May 2025

Starlink : aligned and working #

Friday, May 2, 2025 at 2:45 PM

When I setup the Starlink antenna, I pointed it to the most visible part of the sky.

Yesterday, I got the router I bought on Amazon and plugged it into the antenna's power supply. (I have the "enterprise" antenna)

This allows me to make tests without connecting it to my network.

Fortunately, the app works with that setup. (It didn't work with my ER605 router. I will look into that later)

We discovered that the antenna was pointed opposite to the way recommended by the app.

After aligning it, I'm getting 150+ Mb/s download and 25+ Mb/s upload.

(But it worked too with the antenna pointed the other way).

The antenna is close to the house so it cannot be seen from the street.

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Starlink with ER605 #

Friday, May 2, 2025 at 3:00 PM

I figured out how to make it work with my router.

I had set the "Next Hop" of the static route to "192.168.100.1", but I needed to set it to "0.0.0.0".

The app works fine now.

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Starlink #

Sunday, May 4, 2025 at 10:06 AM

My website is now hosted on Starlink since yesterday.

It seems to work fine.

It is still IPv4-only until I figure out how to make IPv6 work.

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Tomorrow... #

Thursday, May 8, 2025 at 1:19 PM

...the house gets emptied !

We have boxes and stuff everywhere and we need all of that gone so we can put the house up for sale.

They will empty :

- The living room
- The laundry room
- The furnace room
- The two basement apartments
- The two sheds in the backyard

Leaving only the furniture.

What's left we will move in June when we move into the new house.

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My first torrent over Starlink ! #

Saturday, May 10, 2025 at 1:04 PM

I just torrented and watched the latest Doctor Who episode.

It is available here :

http://www.doctorwho2023.net/en/

I made a page explaining how I did it :

http://www.philippe97.ca/torrenting/

It took a while for the download to start and it stalled a few times. 30 minutes of download for 47 minutes of episode.

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Stuck #

Saturday, May 10, 2025 at 4:21 PM

Yesterday, the movers arrived at 8am instead of the 1pm my dad expected.

It turns out that it was my dad who misread the email.

My dad did not have the time to prepare he thought he had. He was rushed.

It took the three movers about three hours to fill their truck, 45 minutes to get it to the new house and over an hour to unload it into the garage.

Since it was still early afternoon, we planned to make another load to pick up what did not fit in the filled truck.

Me and my dad were inside when the truck started going back home.

When we came back, they were badly stuck.

The road to the house is very steep. It goes straight to the St-Lawrence River and the house's garage is to the right of that road.

The truck went head first towards the river, past the garage and backed up towards the garage.

But as he moved away from the garage, instead of turning right and going up the road backwards (the reverse of what he did to get down), he turned left, hoping to go head first to the top of the road.

He got badly stuck. They spent an hour and a half trying to get unstuck. The tires were above the ditch between the road and the garage. They were shovelling the rock under the step at the back of the truck (it was keeping the wheels up, preventing them from having any traction).

In the end, the guy doing the stone around the fireplaces helped us by pulling the truck with his pick-up.

We did not have time for a second load. We will do that next week. That will give my dad time to move the stuff in the sheds outside closer to the house (one shed is on the other side of the river in our backyard).

Bonus : My uncle (a retired mechanic) changed the tires on our 2011 Ford Escape and noticed a huge hole above one of the rear wheels. Also, the relays we installed for the trailer lights no longer work... Yay.

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Starlink blocked ports #

Sunday, May 11, 2025 at 11:23 AM

Port 25 is blocked both inbound and outbound.

Ports 110 and 587 are blocked inbound.

This means I can no longer host my email at home.

I don't know what I'm gonna do.

Cloudflare can forward email, but only if you let it control the DNS for the domain. I'm not going to do that for p97.ca.

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Cloudflare to the rescue ! #

Sunday, May 11, 2025 at 3:35 PM

I just moved my p97.ca domain's nameservers from Dynv6 to Cloudflare.

This allows me to setup email forwarding.

Email sent to p@p97.ca will now be forwarded to my gmail address.

My domain registrar supported email forwarding, but with Cloudflare I can change the IP address with curl. Plus Cloudflare is free.

The IP address Starlink gives us is public and they say it should not change often. But I like to setup a system that easily allows me to update the IP address of all of my domains in one step. That's why I use Dynv6 and Cloudflare as my nameservers.

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Filling up the garage #

Tuesday, May 13, 2025 at 2:41 PM

Today was the second load with the movers.

Our new garage looks pretty big now that there is a lot of stuff in it.

They broke a sheet of glass that goes with a table.

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Starlink tests #

Friday, May 16, 2025 at 5:18 PM

I tried moving our Starlink antenna to get better signal.

I moved it higher to hopefully get the roof out of the way.

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Shower door : in place #

Friday, May 16, 2025 at 5:34 PM

Me and my dad finished installing the glass door.

We also installed the valve and rain shower.

We have the hand shower left to install to complete the shower project.

Tomorrow, we will install the toilet and the sink with new taps (we're using the same toilet and sink we removed weeks ago).

Then, the finishing touches like the toilet paper holder.

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Shower : done ! #

Saturday, May 17, 2025 at 5:17 PM

Today, me and my dad :

- Finished installing the hand shower
- Installed three new lights
- Reinstalled the toilet

In about three hours.

We also started replacing the faucets on the sink. We will finish after supper.

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Sink : in place #

Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 11:58 AM

Me and my dad finished replacing the taps on the sink.

But after we put it back in place, we notice that the pharmacy no longer opens ! The faucet is higher than the old one.

We fixed the problem by lowering the sink. I moved the support on the wall down a quarter of an inch and my dad removed two of the three gaskets on each leg.

Now, there is about a sixteenth of an inch between the mirror and the faucet.

Also, the drain is leaking. I cut it too short. The solution will be to cut it even shorter and use an extension. My dad will also be buying a new P-trap, as the old one is corroded.

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New bathroom : almost done ! #

Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 4:08 PM

All that's left is the baseboards.

Today, me and my dad :

- Redid the drain under the sink.
- Replaced the halogen pot lights with new LED pot lights.
- Reinstalled the ventilation grid.
- Installed various hardware on the walls (toilet paper holder, hand towel holder and towel holder).

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Jacked up #

Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 5:08 PM

Today, me and my dad did a small job : jacking up the basement stairs.

There was a big crack and now it is much smaller.

We used a bottle jack to lift them up and then jammed in a 2x4.

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