DARKCOLD – Justin’s Blog

Fix: Thunderbolt/eGPU Devices Causing Bitlocker to Lock on Reboot

I’m using an eGPU with my notebook (best of both worlds, really thin energy efficient notebook when I’m mobile and gaming-capable desktop when I’m at my desk), but one problem I’ve been dealing with is when I reboot the notebook if the eGPU was connected/disconnected. This is the expected behavior from a security standpoint because the hardware configuration has changed (remember that Thunderbolt uses a PCI-E interface), though this heavy-handedness causes extra work when I need to keep entering the Bitlocker key. We can change Bitlocker to require a password (will reduce the security overall unless we use a cumbersome password which brings us back to the first issue), but I found a better way.

Blue Iris and Home Assistant

I’ve started to explore Home Assistant (why didn’t I give it a try sooner?) and started to get devices and sensors integrated. I’ve got it installed as a virtual machine in Unraid because I wanted to have the HA OS install version as opposed to running it in Docker, so I could access Supervisor among other features. Something I wanted was to display a camera from Blue Iris directly in the dashboard.

Home Network Compete

To suggest that a passion project is ever complete would be lying to myself and to you the dear reader. Truthfully it’s financial constraint that has halted progress on my home network, even with eBay bargains we’ve just entered a rough period which will last many years, but I’m very happy with where it’s at and feel no need to upgrade for the foreseeable future (unless we get better NBN, but even then it’ll only be the Router).

If you haven’t followed my journey to get here (it’s been a bit all over the place so I don’t blame you) it started with utter contempt at a “Gaming Router”, a Netgear XR500. Abandoned by even the creators and never coming through with promised features, it was the implementation of something that should have been trivial – VLAN tagging on the WAN interface that drove me over the edge. I had to employ a double-NAT which was completely non-ideal. I slowly planned the project at the beginning of 2020 and sort of went along, adding and removing countless pieces to get to this, the final configuration: