On... Holiday

We’ve just come back from a couple of weeks away to visit family in Portugal, and while I try and avoid the techy stuff while on holiday, I am who I am and there’s always a couple of “things” creep in at some point…

IPv6 VPN

Like many, I’ve got a VPN gateway running at home (courtesy of my UniFi UDM router). I don’t use it much, but it has its occasions when it comes in useful for a bit of remote admin.

One thing I did forget this time is that while the UDM Teleport VPN seems to do full tunnelling of all traffic back to the VPN gateway, it doesn’t (can’t?) override the client local subnet routing, so if for example your client is sat on a 192.168.1.0/24 IP, and you’re trying to get to a 192.168.1.0/24 IP over the VPN it doesn’t work (as presumably it just tries to route the traffic to the local network).

Luckily I’ve got a static IPv6 /48 block running at home, and one of the big advantages of IPv6 is that unless you’re very, very unlucky (and someone’s configured duplicate ULA ranges) you’re pretty much guaranteed to get unique addressing at each end.

The Teleport client appears to pick up some kind of IPv6 address from the gateway (I didn’t check, probably ULA), so a quick change from IPv4 to IPv6 addresses in my SSH client, and Voila! connectivity!

IPv6 FTW!

Car charging

While we’re in Portugal, we usually have a family member’s car which we can borrow for the trip. Unfortunately this time the car was off the road, so we ended up hiring a car for the duration, and me being me we obviously had to go electric!

We ended up with a 56kWh VW ID.3 Pro from one of the larger hire companies. Now day to day I drive a 77kWh Cupra Born (which is essentially the same car), so no issues with actually driving the car, but…

That 21kWh difference is noticeable. The range did seem to drop quicker than I’ve noted at home, and while it seems to be in line with what apps like ABRP predict, it’s meant more regular charging than I’d usually do, and public charging at that (we don’t have access to home charging where we stay). Which brings me to the second point…

I got an Octopus Electroverse card before leaving the UK (on the advice of a friend), as it promises to work across the charging network in Portugal, and from the OE maps there were a significant number of “supported” chargers listed around where we’d need them.

Overall real world experience was OK…

• In general the larger (Rapid/Ultra) DC chargers tended to work well, with easy one-tap charging (plug-in, tap-the-card, wait). The Electroverse card worked where it was supposed to work and updated in the app in nearly real-time.
• The smaller (Slow/Fast) mainly AC chargers were more problematic, even when from the larger suppliers. The main issue tended to be the charge point not recognising the card or declaring it “Invalid”, with a secondary issue of the charge point not recognising the car! By a couple of days in we were pretty much just skipping any smaller/AC chargers.

The only other major issue we hit was on one particular day on a long-ish drive back to Lisbon, where we stopped off at a services to charge with about 30% left, to find a queue for the charge points. That turned a 20 minute charge into a 1hr charge.

Prices to charge were relatively high (public charging) which couldn’t be avoided, but looking at the distance done (~1000kM) and what we eventually paid, it still ended up cheaper than diesel for the car we usually have use of.

Upgrading Home Assistant

While we were away, HA released a couple of updates for HAOS 16.1 and HA Core 2025.8.2. I’m generally on the ball with updates, tending to install sooner rather than later, but also very wary about triggering updates when I’m not around to fix anything which goes wrong!

So I spent a week and a bit with OCD about not having updated, and comfort about… not having updated.

Needless to say, all updates went through with no issues once we were back home.

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Posted 25 August 2025

In Thoughts