Eero Networking

Ever since the middle of the pandemic, I’ve been using Eero Mesh Networking products in my home. I switched from a single Nighthawk router to the Eero Pro products (pre-Eero 6) and it was a huge upgrade in bandwidth and stability. Unfortunately, it was a huge step backwards in features and monitoring. Ever since I found out they want $$ just to get basic bandwidth monitoring features, which are only available in their mobile app and not via any website, I’ve been searching for alternatives.

After years of searching, I finally gave up. And starting building my own.

DHCP And Hostnames

I let Eero do my DHCP, and it does a good job. It has basic reservations support, but a few things (like the Eero themselves) keep changing IP’s. As far as I can tell, there’s no good way to assign hostnames in a traditional DNS-style way with Eero, so it’s hard to setup any kind of network monitoring while things keep moving around.

I previously maintained a dnsmasq system on a raspberry pi to service up local names, but it was a constant headache as things moved around. Thanks to some amazing work from 343max on github, I was able to build a python tool that generates a hostfile from my configured Device Nicknames and share it across my network. This is the beginning of my “eero-tools” project.

eero_tools

Yeraze • Updated Oct 4, 2024

Still in it’s infancy, the only function it has right now is a simple script that will export your eero’s and all named devices into an /etc/hosts syntax file. I don’t actually use it as my /etc/hosts file, but instead use features of dnsmasq to load it as an alternative, and apply my local domain name ( .yeraze.online ) to it. I recently added support for aliases so that services proxied behind my Synology Reverse Proxy or a Nagios Reverse proxy are all available as well, and adjust to any changing IP’s.

Simply tweak the run.sh to your use case, add this to a cron job to run regularly, and voila everything works.

DNS with AdGuard and dnsmasq

My actual network DNS is served up by AdGuard Home running in a docker container on my Synology NAS. This gives me lots of nice features like multiple parallel lookups, failover, ad and malware blocking, monitoring, and more. However, I needed it to also handle my local network names.

To do this, I took a nearby raspberry pi and set it up with dnsmasq. This is a very lightweight DNS, DHCP, and tftp system that I’ve stripped down to just run DNS for me.

In AdGuard, I setup the following configuration:

This runs most DNS queries thru adguard’s DNS-over-quic system or Google’s DNS, and routes everything on the *.yeraze.online domain over to my raspberry pi at 192.168.4.165 ..

On the raspberry pi, I have a /etc/dnsmasq.conf that contains the following


port=5353
no-resolv
no-poll
no-hosts

server=0.0.0.0
local=/yeraze.online/
addn-hosts=/etc/dnsmasq-hosts.conf
expand-hosts
domain=yeraze.online

The top few lines set the port for the service, and disable use of the /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts files. I then configure any DNS lookups it doesn’t recognize to die at 0.0.0.0, and to route everything *.yeraze.online to the /etc/dnsmasq-hosts.conf file (generated by the eero-tools scripts above, run on an hourly cron). The expand-hosts and domain lines tell dnsmasq to effectively add that domain to every entry in the file.

Conclusion

And voila! I now have working DNS names across my network! I’ll post more in the future, but this was the first step for me to get working SSL up across various services on my network in a reliable way. I’ve recently setup Zabbix, OpenVas, FileBrowser, and a few other services that all really needed SSL but I couldn’t get a valid certificate before. With this in place, I was able to register the domain and get a wildcard cert from LetsEncrypt, and now have everything working.

In additional, now that I have valid working hostnames for everything, I can configure Zabbix to monitor devices via DNS names and it will handle the few cases where an Eero IP changes.