Above the Cloud

I’ve got Internet from Space! The Starlink connection is perfectly fine – and I’m switching from 1Gbs fiber so I have high expectations. The setup was confusing. It turns out, the packing insert with three pictures on it is the instructions. I kept looking for a booklet or something. There really are only three steps and the three pictures are sufficient.

I’m afraid to do anything to the WiFi router. It plugs into the power brick with the antenna – both ethernet powered. It sets itself up through a phone app and then just works, but it has no wired ports. I just ordered a Raspberry Pi to turn into a firewall. The nominal configuration for such a thing seems to be that the wired port is the “outside” and the wifi connection is the “inside”. I will reverse that and have a two node wireless network between the Starlink wifi router and the Pi. I have the WiFi router from Denver, which will plug into the other side of the Pi. It has four wired ports and both old and new wifi.

That means: Desktop to Internal Router to Pi Firewall to Starlink Router to Space, which is only two additional hops from what I’m doing now. We’ll see if it’s worth it when I start watching the firewall metrics. PiHole seems worth trying.