So there I was, three whiskeys deep on a Monday night, staring at a ZimaBoard 2 like it owed me money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
My trusty Protectli with its ancient Celeron J3160 had served me well, but with 2Gbps fiber on the horizon, those 1GbE ports were starting to feel like dial-up. The ZimaBoard 2 promised dual Intel i226-V 2.5GbE NICs, an N150 processor that actually belongs in this decade, and a 6W TDP that wouldn’t heat my office like a space heater. The whiskey said “do it tonight.” The whiskey was wrong, but I listened anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The install started smooth enough. Flash OPNsense to USB, boot it up, watch it recognize both interfaces like a good little BSD box. Then I did what any responsible sysadmin would do: I yanked all the cables from my production firewall mid-install and went full YOLO. No safety net. No fallback. Just vibes and alcohol. The config restore worked, the interfaces came up, WAN grabbed an IP, and I thought I was a genius. Then I noticed WiFi wasn’t working. Not “slow” or “intermittent” \u2014 just fully fucking dead. DHCP was being a little bitch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turns out the ISC DHCP plugin decided it didn’t want to generate a config file. The error logs were helpful in that special way where they tell you exactly what’s wrong but not how to fix it. “Can’t open \/etc\/dhcpd.conf: No such file or directory.” Yeah no shit, that’s the problem. After an hour of increasingly creative troubleshooting \u2014 and another whiskey courtesy of DoorDash, because I have priorities \u2014 a plugin reinstall and reboot finally convinced OPNsense to do its one job. WiFi clients started connecting. Victory was mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But wait, there’s more! My Pixel Tablet decided this was the perfect moment to throw a tantrum. “Authentication problem. Check password and try again.” I know the damn password. I made a QR code for it. I’ve used this network for years. Turns out Android’s MAC randomization resets every time you forget a network, so the tablet kept showing up as a new device and getting confused. The fix? Manually set it to use the device MAC instead of a randomized one. For my home network. Where the only entity tracking me is my own Pi-hole. Thanks Google, very cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ZimaBoard 2 is now humming along at like 5% CPU, sipping power, waiting patiently for that 2Gbps fiber drop. The old Protectli is in the closet waiting for a second career as a travel router or eBay listing. DynDNS is updating to Cloudflare, all my static mappings are working, and the house hasn’t lost internet once since the migration. Total cost: one ZimaBoard, one mini DisplayPort adapter, and roughly half a bottle of whiskey. Was it the smartest way to spend a Monday night? Absolutely not. Would I do it again? Already planning the next upgrade. Cheers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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