Ace Hardware, a Letter About a Router the Maker No Longer Supports, Friends, and a New Hosting Feature

A letter about an end-of-life router

After work, I sent Zogo's Sports Grill & Video Gaming here in Zion a letter about their router. The maker no longer supports it, so I won't be able to support it after November 1, 2026. I laid out some upgrade options so they have time to plan.

Rust-proxy now manages our whole block of internet addresses

This was a big one. We own our own block of internet addresses — the same addresses this blog has mentioned before when I've written about the home network. Up until today, rust-proxy, my traffic-routing tool, only knew how to route traffic to one website at a time by name. Today it took over managing that entire address block directly.

A few things came out of that. First, a real hosting feature: rust-proxy can now hand a customer their own address out of that block, pointed straight at their own server, with a separate block set aside specifically for ham radio use. That'll let me offer hosting as a real product down the road instead of just running things for myself. I tested it end to end with temporary test servers in each range before taking them back down. Second, I moved some of our own infrastructure onto its own dedicated address through rust-proxy too — the box that manages our home network and our main websites each got their own address instead of sharing one with everything else, which makes it easier to tell what's using what. And third, I added an optional way to forward security events — failed logins, certificate problems, that kind of thing — to a separate monitoring system I run, off by default, with live dashboards for anyone who wants that extra layer of visibility.

Also gave the admin dashboard a real redesign so it works properly on a phone, not just a desktop screen.

Ran into a couple of real snags getting there. At one point the box that manages our home network went briefly unreachable because a setting meant to stay put got changed by an unrelated update — found it, fixed it, and added a check that puts it back automatically if it ever happens again. I also found a security key stored in the wrong place. I replaced it everywhere it was used, just to be safe.