dinsdag 10 september 2013

"Smart" Networks

When I ordered the IPv6 capable light bulbs (http://www.nuonenergiewinkel.nl/8696/nuon-smart-lighting-pakket), I had to order an "e-manager account" with it. This costs an additional 2.95 Euro per month and basically, it makes the gateway (the small black box) talk with the energy suppliers website portal, so you can switch your lights on/off from wherever you are.

When I was looking into Tado for an IPv6 capable thermostat, I noticed that it costs 99 Euro Per Year (!).

Where is the time that you just bought an appliance and hook it up to your own network, where you are in charge of everything? Why do I have to go through my energy providers portal to access my lights? That is just so wrong!

Other than that, just when I connected my light bulb, I read an article that it is actually easy to hack my lights!
(http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/163972-philips-hue-led-smart-lights-hacked-whole-homes-blacked-out-by-security-researcher)

So the next step in this project will be thinking about security and protecting our house from hacked lights, pingfloods on the front door etc.

woensdag 7 augustus 2013

IPv6 enabled front door!

13:56][benjamin@gangkast:~]$ ping6 voordeur
PING voordeur(2001:981:1079:1:ba27:ebff:fe26:d83f) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:981:1079:1:ba27:ebff:fe26:d83f: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.66 ms
64 bytes from 2001:981:1079:1:ba27:ebff:fe26:d83f: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.739 ms
^C

(where voordeur is front door in Dutch)

:)

zondag 4 augustus 2013

The new IPcam prototype...

Of course we could have paid 430 Euro for an Axis IPv6 enabled cam, but since we are on a roll with Raspberry Pies, Ben decided to make his own IPcam.
The left side of the picture shows the white ethernet cable, going to the utility closet where the router and switch are. It is connected from the Raspberry Pi to the switch. The black cable to the right goes to the cam outside the front door. Ben had to solder the cable back to 1 piece after he cut it to fit through the wall, so we'll leave it hanging like this tonight, to see if the solder holds :)
When this setup proves successful, we might change the cam itself, because the image quality is not very good.

Thermostats

While Benjamin was working on the NAS and media centers, I decided to do some research on thermostats. 2 Years ago, we bought a Heatmiser PRT-WS WiFi thermostat. It had apps and we could control the temperature of the house with our phone. How cool!
However, no IPv6 support.
I contacted the  support desk (see previous post) and the outcome was simple: "We don't have the IPv6 service". I assumed the person at the helpdesk didn't know what IPv6 was, so I sent an e-mail back asking when IPv6 was on their roadmap and which thermostat would have IPv6 support first.
Anyway, I'm still waiting for a reply....I did get a customer satisfaction survey back.

So I looked online. There is a German company called Tado (tado.com) and they do exactly what I'm looking for, including IPv6 support for the thermostat and apps and wifi and everything.
They only ship in Germany. If you can get me one of those, I would be very grateful :)

The only thing is the price. 99 Euro....Per Year! That is not cheap.

For now, we can't upgrade our thermostat. Buh.

Media Centers

In every room we had a Raspberry Pi, running Raspbmc (a Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi with XBMC) for our music and other media. As Raspberry Pi had fine support for IPv6, this was an easy step.
The only issue we had, was not IPv6 related. Raspbmc sometimes wasn't very stable so we changed it to OpenELEC (Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center).  OpenELEC also supports IPv6.

All Raspberries are connected to the NAS. We had a Netgear ReadyNAS RND4000 but there will never be IPv6 support for it. On top of that, it was time for a nice upgrade anyway....




Benjamin decided to build the NAS himself with the following specs:
Homebuilt PC
ASrock motherboard
Intel core I5
4x Western Digital 2T disk

The 4 2T disks are in an ZFS pool (raid Z1) and the operating system and databases are run from the SSD.

The costs? A whopping 550 Euro for the hardware and another 200 Euro for the disks. But hey, our NAS is now IPv6 ready :)

The internet works!

After my last update, we had theoretically IPv6 at home. However, then the first issue came up.
We now have 2 providers and we have to keep it that way.
The standard XS4all Fritz!box 7360 could not do Multi-WAN.
I called out to Eric van Uden from AVM and he was absolutely amazing, giving us very useful tips and tricks for our project. Unfortunately, our Fritz!box 7360 was not able to do it. The more expensive Fritz!box 7390 could, but we had a lot of money to spend on the next challenge, so we decided to go for another solution.

The plan now was to use a computer (ASRock ION 330) as a router/firewall with PFsense.
IPv6 support woth PFSense is still in Beta and we couln't get it to work.
My colleague knows one of the developers of PFSense and put us in contact.
We offered a testbed, but in the end, it just took too long.

Finally, the first challenge was solved. We now run OpenWrt Barrier Breaker on the Netgear WNR3500U. OpenWrt has good IPv6 support, does firewalling, Multi-Wan and DHCP-PD works fine as well!

At the moment we have 3 WAN uplinks:
IPv4 UPC
IPv4 XS4all
IPv6 XS4all

The IPv4 traffic is now loadbalanced between 2 providers but we currently have some issues with that.

zaterdag 20 april 2013

Last week, I received a confirmation from XS4all that my DSL line would be activated on Monday. A technician is scheduled to come to our house on Tuesday to connect the Fritz!Box7360 and measure the line. I will not ask the poor guy to set up IPv6, as XS4all has a very easy do-it-yourself interface.

As I was curious about the level of IPv6 knowledge of the helpdesk, I called them and asked if they could disable IPv4 on the line. The helpdesk employee was very surprised and thought I had no idea what I was talking about: "No madam, that is a very bad idea at this point in time. You would not be able to use the internet as you are used to." I laughed and agreed that this indeed sounded crazy, but that we were doing a project with IPv6 only home automation and it was my intention not to use IPv4 on this line. He checked with his colleagues and explained that they use the IPv4 address of the line for administrative purposes, so he could not disable IPv4 for me.
The employee clearly knew what IPv6 was and he was eager to help me. Kudos for the XS4all helpdesk!

One of the first things on my to-do list was investigate if we could use a similar setup with our current thermostat. We use a Heatmiser (PRS-TS wifi). The documentation on their website didn't give any hits when searching on "IPv6", so I contacted their helpdesk with a webform to ask if any of their products support IPv6 at the moment, if it is on their roadmap and which products will support IPv6 (and when!) I will let you know the outcome, but at the moment I'm looking around for other vendors as well.

woensdag 17 april 2013

After the IPv6 launch, I had a chat with some people about "what is next?" We already had an IPv6 World Day in 2011, a World Launch in 2012 so the only logical question is; what can we do in 2013?
Most ISPs, content providers, data centers and even governments are busy. At least with looking into IPv6. So lets make this the year of the End User!

It is 2013 and still, my cable provider can't provide me with IPv6 connectivity. They also can't tell me when they will! From others I hear that the "last mile" is still a big issue. There are no "eyeballs"
This screams for an experiment :-)

Here is the scenario:
-I live with my soon-to-be husband in a small town near Amsterdam. I am an IPv6 trainer and Ben is a Network Engineer at an ISP.

-The only provider that can deliver native IPv6 in our region is XS4all. The only product available to our house is ADSL. As we are quite far from the DSLAM, the maximum speed we can get is 3Mbps.
This is a bit unfortunate.

-We have a lot of home automation or domotics. Our lights, heating, webcams, coffee machine, media setup all work in some automated way. We have smartphones and apps to control these devices.

The question is: In 2013, what can you do with IPv6 in your house? Does my printer still work? My IP webcam? The app for my heating system, well, you get the idea :-)

I will keep you posted on how we are doing.
Just for the record: We will keep our IPv4 connection for now, we also need to work from home sometimes.....