Owing to the failure of oregano detailed in the last post, I have finally taken steps to clean up a long standing issue in my internal network, viz: that oregano, the primary development computer was offering essential network services which all the other boxes relied upon. When oregano was down, almost everything else suffered.

This problem dates back at least 20 years. In early days I began the practice of having my primary linux computer act as a firewall separating the rest of the network from the internet, and as the dhcp server. I won’t try to defend the practice – it was what I did; but it has made less and less sense over the years. Plus it had the very undesirable side effect that when that primary computer was down the other systems lost their dhcp server and their path to the net.

I had this generic Chinese openwrt router which I bought last year, for reasons passing understanding. I’d planned to replace the primary router with it, but that proved a bad plan. I decided to use this extra router to fill the role oregano had filled, of separating the internal and external networks.

So this router, named obelisk, performs dhcp and dns forwarding. Henceforth Oregano will be just another box on the internal network.