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We are going to talk about smart homes. What to buy, what to avoid. My idea of a smart home is not buying a device and then having to setup a user account with some company and having that device talk to this company. What I am going to talk about is a real smart house that works for you. Something that will last for years, not spy on your or cost you monthly fees other than the electricity to run them. They need to be reliable and secure. We want a smart house, not a spy house. It is well known that TV maker TCL scan your network for devices and send this info back to China so the communist can spy on Americans. They can tell when you leave your house and when you are home. This is a problem. We can avoid this by making sure we buy the correct smart devices and configure your network to have several sub networks.

If we go back in time, in 2018, was getting smart devices like WeMo smart switches and Ring Doorbell. When you buy one of these products, it requires you to setup an account on their server. Along with this account, you need to use it to control your devices. So every time you turn on or off your device, it send the command to WeMo for example. Whey do we need this? Along with the harvesting your personal data, these companies require you to install an app on your smart phone that has very invasive settings. These are all bad things. You agree to it when you signup. The worst part of this for me is WeMo’s website no longer lets me sign in. This is a problem. Now the switches in my wall are no longer smart becuase WeMo shutdown there servers. So much for spending 50 dollars a switch just to have to replace it in 2 years. The other issue is the spying these companies do. Ring Doorbell lets the FBI, DEA, state and local police view your cameras and recordings. You agreed to this when you signed up for their service. Is 30 dollars a year wortht the price to see your doorbell? I think not. With that said, all Amazon, Apple or any smart device that requires an account to use their products is not an option. I recomend getting Z-Wave products. You don’t need an account that sells your info or lets others spy on you.

Speaking about spying, Amazon, Google and Apple are one of the worst spys we have in our house. Your Alexa is listening to everything it can pick up on the microphone. Sending this back to Amaazon’s servers to anaylasis. This is the same for Google and Apple. Google makes tones of money by profilign you and pumping adds that are specifilly for you. Since 2018, I have unplugged my Ring Doorbell, Alexa and my Google Home. Still have an Android phone with Google Apps(GAps) installed. I know GAps is spying but I try and mitagate this. At a furture time, I will remove GAps from my phone and show how to setup your own cloud servers like Next Cloud, SyncThing using OpenVPN to secure your network connection. This works great for me. Once I finally cut the cord and remove GAps, I will post how it works.

Let’s talk about something less conspericy thery. What makes a good smart home? We need a smart home that can turn on and off lights based on rules and sensors. We need a smart home that can tell when we have a water leak or notify us when there is motion on your camera’s or motions sensors. One of the worst examples of a smart device is the Samgung smart refrigorator. There is no need for a webcam in it or no need for your frig to talk to Samsung for connectivity. We want a frig that will let us know if it gets to warm. Letting is address the issue before your expenise food goes bad like meat in the freezer. What are you going to do when Samsung deciceds not to support your smart device? Get a new fridge? That seems stupid. We need just a regular fridge with sensors in it. A temp, humidity, power usage and light senssor make sense to me. This way, we can see if it starts working hard or just fails.

For a smart house to work, we need a central hub to controll it. Curently using Home Assistant with no cloud account. Home Assistant is an open souce project. You can download the source code, review it, add to it. You can feel much better knowing that the public can review the code, looking for back doors or spying code. You will need a computer to host your Home Assistant instance. A Raspberry Pi works very well. Used one for years. One issue I had was the SD card would fill up or fail fairly quickly. Leaving you to put in a new SD card and reinstalling Home Assistant. Since then, I am running Home Assistant as a Virtual Machine(VM) on my server. for my sudgested setup, you will need a Z-Wave controller to give Home Assistant access to the Z-Wave network.

Hope you can see what a smart home should be. It should work for you, not sell your info to a 3^rd party or let other people view your personal habits or data. A smart home needs to be secure, private and do things that are benifical to your house. Being able to monitor your temp and humidity in different parts of the house in important. Being able to detect a water leak is very important. This can be done by monitoring the water main or by having sensors under areas that might leak like the washing machine, dishwasher, basement floor, hot water heater or other commone falure points.

If we ditch the Ring Doorbell like I did, what do we use? At this time, using a standard doorbell from Menards. Along with this, I also have POE hardwired, 4k security cameras pointed at my doors and around the house. These cameras are on a VLan that does not have access to the inernet or the other parts of my secure network. We don’t someone unplugging the camera and tapping in to our secure network. These camera are streaming to a dedicated computer running a DVR. This DVR has Artifical Intelegents(AI) to process the images. Once it detects a person, it starts recordding. The AI is a much better option then just motion detections. you don’t want to record shadows, squirls or the random dog. What I am interested in people coming to the house. Setting off an alert that is send to me when the alarm is set.

I will admit this not for a none tech savy person. It isn’t rocket scince but it might help to have a degree in Information Technoligies(IT) or a passion for IT. In the future, we will talk about how to setup a secure network for Internet of Things(IoT) devices. How to secure your privacy on an Android Cell phone. How big tech monitors you and how we can lessen this. If you read this far, please leave comments and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for reading my ad free site,

Aaron.

The core of the future house is the network. The network is the nerve system of your house. This will dictate how fast devices communicate, how secure your network is and greatly increase the functions of your house. Since the pandemic has started, many more people are staying at home. With this said, a good home network is very sought after. In this article, we will talk about home automation, network connectivity, subnetworks, firewalls and switches.

The router(pfsense)

For a home network, we are going to think of the router as the brains of the network. It will be responsible for connecting to the internet. Providing a firewall against the internet. The router will also have the DHCP server. This box should have an open source linux of freebsd OS. The router I am going to sudgest is a good router but isn’t the only one that should be considered. I would recomend running a PfSense router. Ether buy a netgate router, buying a router motherboard and install PfSense on it. You can also run PFsese on a dedicated computer that has 2 or more network adaptors. The recomended hardware is a open source router motherboard from PCengines. It has 3, gigabit network adaptors. This routers has plenty of memory in it to run Pfsense. If you order this board, get the metal case. It looks good and metal is nice to have. The main reason we want to run pfsense is because it is open source. The software is reviewed by people who understand security. With open source, we can feel safe knowing there are not back doors. If there was, someone will find and it report it. Other reasons are the firewall, subnetting, quality of service, built in VPN server and intrusion detectons. You can see pfsese is very powerful and if configured correctly, will greatly increase your network security.

Firewall and VPN

One of the first things to configure is the firewall. Turn it on. You should not open ports unless you are running a server. The server we will be runign is a OpenVPN server. For example, if you wanted to use remote desktop or view your secuirty camersa, you would not open up the ports for remote desktop or webcams. What you would do is configure a VPN server. This way, when you are away from home, you can use the VPN server to connect your remote devices to your home network. This connection will be secure and give you access to your network like you are at home. Another advange of using a VPN is you can connect your phone to it while on public or unsecure WIFI. This will encript your trafic back to your house. Protecting you from other users of the public or unsecure WIFI you are connected to.

VLans and Subnets

What are VLans and why do we need them at home? A VLan is a way to logically divide a physical network in to segments or subnets that can or can’t be communicate with other subnets based on firewall rules. This gives you another layer of protection. Keeping secure devices away from unsecure devices is one of the only ways to protect your self from cheap Internet of Things(IoT) devices. Everyone has them. This can be a smart switch, smart thermostat, smart TV, basically, anything smart is an IoT device. These devices are newer and many companies are coming out with new ones every day. One problem with these devices are some are only support for a short time. Leaving security holes or just sending your data outside of your network. After you buy a smart device, you might find out it is not very secure and one thing you can do to secure them it to create a network for IoT devices. This network will not have access to your secure networks. In order to have a VLan, we will need 2 or more switches or a switch that supports VLans.

Quality of Service

This might see obvious what Quality of Service(QoS) does. It gives you setting to ensure specific traffic get priority.

Hope you enjoyed this article on Home networking Best Practices. Look forwarded to reading your post. If you want further information on any subject, please send a message and I will review it. Future topics will be what smart devices should I buy. Cloud services, what ones to use and what ones to avoid. How to automate your home. How to debload windows. Is my memory slowing down my PC? Thanks for visiting, come again.

Aaronwarwick.com has deployed a plex server. Adding this server will allow users to view the shared media from the data center. Look forward to live TV when the HD homerun is installed.

Now that we have a dedicated server for the website, it is time to start developing it into something good. It is about time. Now that SSL is set up, we are going to start adding content and SEO. Hope to see you soon.

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