Category Archives: networks

Upgrading my home network

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For a number of years, I’ve been using a TL-WR1043ND running DD-WRT as my home router, even going as far as replicating the same setup for friends and family, as it struck a happy midpoint of being powerful enough to be useful, but also simple and stable enough for the slightly less technically literate to manage. The DD-WRT setup was surprisingly simple, and I’ve been reasonably impressed by the performance and capabilities of the software, even on such a basic consumer model of router. That said, around 12 months ago I realised that my home network was rapidly outgrowing this basic setup, and I felt the need to lean towards something a bit more “prosumer“. There are quite a few different companies targeting this market, but one in particular stood out to me – Mikrotik.

Around 12 months ago I took the dive and bought a RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN (that’s quite the product name!) – one of their mid-line models which seemed quite reasonably priced, and got stuck into learning the intricacies of RouterOS. Their own WinBox software provides a very usable GUI for configuring their hardware, granting a view to the myriad of different features of the board while keeping the learning curve shallow enough to avoid you becoming swamped by options. I’ve gradually tweaked and enabled more and more services, to the point where the single device is providing:

  • PPPoE to my ISP
  • DHCP
  • DNS (local and external)
  • Firewall
  • WiFi (more on this below)
  • L2TP connection to a VPN provider, with certain traffic automatically routed through this
  • … and a whole lot more!

Additionally, when I moved into my new house earlier this year, I set about removing the need for using HomePlug to connect various devices in different rooms, as I found that these tended to be unstable, causing slow transfer speeds and a high rate of dropped connections. I ended up running CAT6 from my study through to several other rooms in the house (I may blog about that project some time in the future!), which eliminated the need for the HomePlugs, but highlighted how poor my WiFi setup was (having previously blamed this on the dodgy connections). While researching ways to improve coverage, I struck upon a feature of RouterOS that I hadn’t yet taken advantage of – CAPsMAN (Controlled Access Point System MANager). This essentially allows you to delegate control of various MikroTik device radios to a central ‘manager’, which pushes out the WiFi configuration to create a seamless network across all access points. I picked up a couple of Home Access Points (hAP) and set these up as slaves to CAPsMAN running on the main router (as well as the radios on the router itself being delegated to CAPsMAN, not something that’s recommended officially but seems to work for me), and I haven’t had any complaints about sub-par WiFi performance since!

My next step involves upgrading the heart of my network to something with a few more gigabit speed ports – I’ve already run out of capacity in my “rack” (a re-purposed IKEA bookshelf) – so I’m looking at getting a CRS125-24G-1S-2HnD-IN (there we go again with the brilliant product names!) to act as the core router, and demoting the current RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN to act as a switch and access point in the living room instead of the “dumb” switch in there currently.

While I realise there are quite a few alternative offerings coming to market that simplify home networking (Google WiFi, Ubiquiti Unifi etc), I’m more than happy with what Mikrotik have to offer both in terms of the hardware and software, and I continue to be impressed by how straightforward yet powerful my home network has become now that there’s something more powerful behind it. I might even start suggesting an upgrade to the parents network!

Dishing up media

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As my latest project for ‘what to do when incredibly bored in the evening’ is to find a way of creating a central server for all of my media (starting with music, the rest is pretty easy) and then being able to play it off any device, preferably with some kind of specialised app for iPhone that would let me download tracks and playlists for local playback. If anyone has undertaken a similar project, I’d love to hear about it!

So – the task list so far:

  • Stable running media server
  • Automatic feed-in of new content (from download server – will blog about that one some other time!)
  • Automatic tagging (ID3 etc) of new content (this may be a step too far!)
  • Playlist viewing/editing
  • Access over the network
  • Access over the internet
  • Access from the iPhone (including local playback)
  • Front end media player (using XBMC or similar) for video/picture

Sounds like another one of those pipe-dreams, but I’m off to a pretty good start it seems! I’ve struck upon using some sort of DAAP server (currently running forked-daapd, will probably end up with the original daapd as it seems a bit more stable) off a dedicated test machine (so I don’t bork up my other running server, I’ve got plenty of old machines lying around the house at the moment!) which can then be connected to anywhere off the internal network, and some simple port forwarding should sort that for the wider world.

The only gripe at the moment is the lack of playlist support – the DAAP protocol isn’t designed to have anything to do with playlist editing, and that’s a pretty major feature I want to have! I may end up with some kind of web interface to the server that’ll let me edit playlists directly – not ideal, but I guess it’ll do the trick.

I’m currently struggling with the iPhone access part – I’ve found a single DAAP client (Simple DAAP Client), but that doesn’t support any caching, and is very basic (but free). I may have to resort back to some kind of manual syncing to get the iPod functionality, which would be a shame, but not an insurmountable problem.

The automatic tagging is definitely a big problem – what I’m envisaging at the moment is a daemon running on the server that uses Musicbrainz or something similar to update ID3 tags on MP3s as they are added on to the server, however such a thing may be slightly beyond the realms of possibility at the moment unfortunately. One day maybe…

I’ll try and keep this post up to date with my progress, but it’s likely to be slow work as my entire ‘server farm’ is being uprooted and moved to London in a few weeks. Flat hunting later this week, better make sure it’s got plenty of cupboard space for all these machines!

Back from Barnswood

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Been camping again, Barnswood this time, "running" the home base for the Cheshire Hike practice with McNetwork.

Not a lot of work, just a hell of a lot of lasagne. Lots of lasagne. 3 trays of it to be precise… we’ve been eating it for dinner and tea the past 3 days!

Was a fun weekend (besides the food :P), watching a few films, drinking. The usual!

Think the downfall of the weekend for me was fruit cocktails. Found a Margarita maker in Netto for £7 (basically a blender made out plastic) and then preceded to put fruit and booze into it. I thought it would be healthy – not deadly! Lesson learned.

Anyway, sleep time.

</3 Printers & Networks

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I have officially fallen out with wireless networks over this weekend. Printer stopped doing network printing over this week, so decided to fix it yesterday afternoon. 3 hours later, nothing works any more. It turned into one of those projects which keeps getting further away from the true goal. I think XKCD summed it up pretty well!

Anyway, we decided to bite the bullet and get two new printers (one for me and one for sister). This way – I get to keep it when I go to uni 😛 Haha

Will be collecting it from Argos tomorrow afternoon! Then the installation fun begins!