Random Realizations

My weekend has been too busy with tax returns for me to get my new GPU up-and-running as I had hoped. So, I resolved to give myself some remote access with which to finish the job on the train this week. Related to that, here are some key discoveries.

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eero -- the popular wireless mesh solution I chose to run in my house -- does not support any kind of dynamic DNS registration, despite people having requested this feature for the past couple of years. At first, this seemed to make the entire idea of remote access a non-starter, but then I realized that the management application seems to work fine from outside the firewall - which means that you can use it to find out the current IP of your home network at any point in time. For my purposes, this is more than adequate and actually more secure, anyhow.

BTW, I was rather surprised to find out that eero doesn't have a firewall as such and therefore, if connected directly to your home cable modem, sort of puts your entire home network directly on the Internet. Having said that - it is rather a matter of perspective. On one hand, this is the architecture that allows direct access from the eero app, I'm sure. On the other hand, since being directly connected doesn't cause any security risk until you forward ports, it could be said that the entire network is firewalled by default.

So, all-in-all, I'm happy with this state of affairs. I can certainly see where it would be better for most non-techies in their homes than a traditional router!

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"kubectl port-forward" takes an optional parameter of "--address", which - if you set it to 0.0.0.0 will allow the content it is forwarding to be consumed from another machine. In my case, this means that by forwarding the right ports to the right box in my network, I can log in, start the JupyterHub forwarding, then connect to it with a browser from my laptop on the train. So, my experimenting need no longer be limited to the thin band of hours after I get home from work every evening.