YeOlds tech explorations

My old phone drained its battery fast anyway. It was an old phone with an old battery, so I didn't expect anything else. When I got a new phone, it was a relief to have proper battery life again.

Then one morning I woke up with quite a chunk less battery than expected. Going through the phone's energy monitor, I noticed something unusual: about 25% of the energy usage had gone to the radio. I had never noticed the radio being particularly high before.

The day before, I had installed WireGuard Portal in my Kubernetes cluster and configured WireGuard on my phone. That seemed suspicious, but there was an obvious problem with that theory:

WireGuard wasn't connected.

The WireGuard tunnel wasn't active. The WireGuard client wasn't even running. So how could WireGuard possibly be keeping my phone's Wi-Fi radio busy?

Matter: The universal smart home standard.

A vendor-agnostic way to connect smart home devices to any controller—and even to multiple controllers at once.

Designed for seamless, plug-and-play setup right out of the box.
That is, if your setup is just a basic router.
The story quickly changes when running multiple VLANs.
In this article, I'll explain how to run Matter successfully on a VLAN behind a firewall.