Interesting Home/Personal network setups

[howartp]

Sorry if i missed this but does anyone run automation at home? Going to be moving soon before i do the house up. I already have the network side planned, the lighting, heating and av is planned, just wanted to see if anyone also had security hooked up?

Yep.

 

Indigo Domotics - Advanced Mac-based Smart Home Hub

 

My DSC Alarm panel is (was & will be) connected to LAN so when we set/unset the alarm, various things happen in house.

[GuyJD]

Just my Virgin Superhub and a couple of 500mb powerline network adaptors going to my gaming pc and my xbox does the job just fine.

[mavhc]

Virgin Superhub 2 to a 8 port gigabit switch, which links to 3 rooms upstairs, another 8 port gigabit switch links to 2 rooms downstairs, in the AV cabinet under the TV in each there's a wifi router with the router part turned off, or an 8 port switch to all the AV stuff. 24 hdd server in network cab that runs everything on debian, media serving via smb, http and plex, dhcp/dns, file store, cacti, openhab2 for automation, znc, quassel, mpd.

 

RPi or Atom computers under the TVs, plus some £8 used chromecasts on each TV

[Davit2005]

I run something not too dissimilar to @Davit2005:

 

• VMWare hypervisor (Free version), definately not low power! dual 8 thread proc's and 32GB RAM, running:
  
  • pfSense firewall/filter
    
  • Secondary DC
    
  • File server
    
  • PBX
    
  • Print
    
  • CCTV server
    
  • MSSQL server
    
  • Mail server
    
  • WDS/MDT
    
  • Minecraft Server
    

   

  [*]Physical DC (AD, DNS, DHCP)

  [*]FreeNAS iSCSI storage server for all VM storage, including file server

  [*]Backup server, just hosting a CIFS share for inbound connections

 

 

Your PBX gave me an extra ID, it's surprisingly easy, there are some Linux and Windows solutions. Cheap plans for SIP trunks on the Internet and with calls to nearly all landlines at 1p/min and 10p/min to mobile. International calls to places like EIRE and Italy under 2p/min.

 

So add a PBX to my original list.

 

The only issue now I'm getting the need for 64GB hosts, but that'll have to wait

Edited April 19, 2017 by Davit2005

[mukz]

Yep.

 

Indigo Domotics - Advanced Mac-based Smart Home Hub

 

My DSC Alarm panel is (was & will be) connected to LAN so when we set/unset the alarm, various things happen in house.

 

Thanks! Will also have a look into that, especially as it links into honeywell which is what my alarm is.

[mjk]

Do none of you just spin up virtual machines in the cloud ?

It's certainly my favourite way of working if I'm doing dev work between home and school.

[howartp]

Thanks! Will also have a look into that, especially as it links into honeywell which is what my alarm is.

 

It's an exceptionally well supported and developed product with a great community of plugin developers - something to be admired in this day and age.

 

Have a look on their forum; there's tonnes of support on there - including yours truly!

[computer_expert]

At the moment I use a DDNS address to point to my BT (yeurk! Only went with them to get the line installed as it was free from them and nearly £200 from others) router. When contract renewal comes around, I'll be going with Plusnet as they'll give me static IPs, then buy a domain name from my preferred registrar.

 

As far as mail servers go, I'm using the open version of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Due to DNS names not being what I want, I'm only using that for junk at the moment, but the last school I worked at used it for both staff and student email accounts. It's quite a powerful product.

 

I have a hosted domain with cpanel . I have a script running on a Linux server that when my local ip changes it updates the DNS entry on the cpanel . This allows me to openvpn into home all the time .

 

i'm just using normal residential broadband - BT Infinity.

Port 25 is open - MX record points to a filtering provider, then they forward the mail to me using by dyndns domain.

router has dyndns entry so destination always up to date. never had any issues or downtime.

 

Thanks for the info - I'd have thought that most residential IPs would have been added to spam blacklists but it appears not.

 

 

Where do you get your licenses from for Windows servers?!

 

I use the OEM licences (if the server has them) for long standing things like DCs otherwise I use the 180 day evaluations for everything else.

[ITGURU]

Thanks for the info - I'd have thought that most residential IPs would have been added to spam blacklists but it appears not.

 

I use the OEM licences (if the server has them) for long standing things like DCs otherwise I use the 180 day evaluations for everything else.

 

Never had any issues but it might be because i use commercial products for the SMTP inbound/outbound :

 

For Outbound email i use - Prolateral Outmail

For Inbound filtering and forwarding to my server - SpamHitman

[Eek]

At the moment I use a DDNS address to point to my BT (yeurk! Only went with them to get the line installed as it was free from them and nearly £200 from others) router. When contract renewal comes around, I'll be going with Plusnet as they'll give me static IPs, then buy a domain name from my preferred registrar.

 

As far as mail servers go, I'm using the open version of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Due to DNS names not being what I want, I'm only using that for junk at the moment, but the last school I worked at used it for both staff and student email accounts. It's quite a powerful product.

 

I looked in to plusnet when I moved home, I was told by sales I could have static IPs but when I double checked on a second call was told I could request static IPs from the tech team but they couldn't guarantee it would be accepted. I also wouldn't be able to make the request until I had placed the order. And this was for a business package as well. So it wasn't a risk I was prepared to take.

 

I went with Zen and can't recommend them enough. I think you get one static IPv4 address as standard or I pay £5ish more per month for a block of 8 (5 usable). You can request to be placed on the IPv6 trial too which I've had running for a while.

 

 

I also run iRedMail based mailservers behind this setup, never had an issue with SMTP.

[Davit2005]

Do none of you just spin up virtual machines in the cloud ?

It's certainly my favourite way of working if I'm doing dev work between home and school.

 

I've looked into this and seen some of the cost of cloud Servers and then think about the costs of backing them up. Plus the fact I have streaming servers with GB's of movies.

 

It's taken me a while to accrue the equipment I have and given the low power consumption of 150watts when its all on, I'm sure I'd be financially better off hosting the 15+ VM's myself.

[Sephiroth]

Do none of you just spin up virtual machines in the cloud ?

It's certainly my favourite way of working if I'm doing dev work between home and school.

 

The costs for me are roughly £50pcm for electricity, but that includes wireless, switching and filtering, as well as the 2TB of data on my file server. Looking at some prices, I'd need to spend ~£100pcm to get the basic services (on a single instance, not spread out) and still have to host the file server.

 

As far as doing dev goes, I have the flexibility to just roll up a fresh server for a specific purpose (exactly as I would on the cluster at work) and play with it however I want, without having to pay out for another instance.

[mjk]

The costs for me are roughly £50pcm for electricity, but that includes wireless, switching and filtering, as well as the 2TB of data on my file server. Looking at some prices, I'd need to spend ~£100pcm to get the basic services (on a single instance, not spread out) and still have to host the file server.

 

As far as doing dev goes, I have the flexibility to just roll up a fresh server for a specific purpose (exactly as I would on the cluster at work) and play with it however I want, without having to pay out for another instance.

I see. I don't really store any data at home so our requirements are quite different.

What I do is replicate the school system in the cloud using Google compute engine. If I need to fire up some file server or web servers it's really simple - but I only keep them running for a short amount of time to check configurations etc so it doesn't really cost anything.

[Sephiroth]

Yeah, if that's all you're using it for it makes far more sense to do something like that with the idea that it's only temporary.