Digital Home

I blogged here and there before describing various components of my digital home. The WiFi network, the IP Camera, the Squeezeboxes, the Slimserver... Now after several years of putting together several ad-hoc components the time has come to redesign the entire systems from scratch, based on the experinence with various products, vendors and technologies.

I will be updating this post, so come down here in a few weeks to see what has changed. Today just a short list of bullet points of what I intend to cover.

First of all I have two homes (one small wooden cottage I love to spend summer and weekends in) and a second one in the city, with a hot tub for harsh winter :). The ultimate goal is to connect both homes together and have a unified user experience in as many aspects as possible - starting from music playlists that should be up to date and synchronized among my iPod and both places, to the IP subnets addressing to be able to connect to any device from anywhere.

So here is the entire idea in a nutshell:

• There will be a VPN tunnel set up between both homes. The one in the country has a fixed IP DSL line (1Mb only, unfortunately...). The one in the city has a 2Mb line with dynamic IP. I intend to use a Dlink DFL-800 VPN Router / Firewall there. The DFL-800 will server as a remote VPN server (I want to be able to connect to the home network whenever I am on the road) and also as a VPN endpoint of a tunnel between the homes. On the other side of the tunnel I plan to use a Dlink DFL-200 (have to check if it can "redial" the other end when DSL IP address is recycled by the service provider or whenever the link is just dropped. If the DFL-200 does not handle the tunnel good enough, I will probably opt for a second DFL-800.
• Behind the firewalls I plan to use the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ storage servers. They will serve as a generic storage on a local area network. I plan to set up replication jobs between them, so that each unit is a backup of the other. This way, for example, when I buy new music and save it on one of them, the content will be replicated to the other home, ready to be played there when I move.
• The Infrant units will host Slimservers to power a local array of Squeezeboxes to handle multi - room audio around each home. This is easy to do now, as the latest Infrant boxes come with Slimserver preloaded.
  
• Looking forward the Infrant units will serve as multi-purpose DLNA - compliant home servers, to be able to stream videos to various devices like the PS3 console or a Loewe Connected TV, or pictures to connected photo frames around each home.
• Infrants will also store live picture snapshots from IP cameras, so the WiFi photo frames will be able to show near-real-time pictures from the other end. Living in the city it will always be nice to have a look at the wonderful virgin winter in the country :)
• There will be other addons, like UPS units, WiFi access points, I will be describing them if they deserve some attention.

That is all from the distant perspective... will see how it goes... as the devil is in the details (as always!).