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Moar automation

Matthew Schick — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:52:41 +0000

Got a few more bits added this weekend:

GE 45609 Z-Wave Wireless Lighting Control On/Off Switch
GE 45614 Z-Wave Wireless Lighting Control 3-Way Switch Kit
Trane TZEMT400BB3 Remote Energy Management Thermostat

Used the normal switch for our ceiling fan/lighting fixture in the den, was hoping for something to be able to control the fan and lighting separately but the module for that is almost 3x more expensive than the switch so decided it just wasn’t worth it for now. The three way switch I installed in our downstairs hallway. Installation there was slightly trickier than a normal two way, but a few minutes with a multimeter got me up and running.

The thermostat was the most interesting of the three pieces to install, mostly since the installation manual assumes a level of familiarity with home cooling systems that I didn’t have going in. It’s really meant to be installed by a professional, but a little google research filled in the missing pieces. One note here, the thermostat I replaced was modern enough that the wiring was done correctly and was nicely labeled. If not for that, I would have had to spend significant time tracing wires and potentially running a common 24v wire to provide power.

Once installed, all three devices paired easily with my controller and I was able to get em included in a few more scenes without issue. The more I play with this stuff, the better it seems to get…

Initial Automation Success

Matthew Schick — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:07:49 +0000

Got my various HA bits in this morning, was able to get the Vera Lite controller set up (dead easy) with my lamp plug and dimmer switch. All paired without issue and was able to set up a few rudimentary scenes to begin playing. The Vera web ui is well laid out, very straight forward and commands executed there are reflected almost instantly.

I’m using the Home Buddy beta app on my android devices (link) which works well. It does both spoken scene commands as well as allowing for control via Tasker (untested, but next on my list).

Home automation experiment begins

Matthew Schick — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:06:00 +0000

Got a few bits on the way to start this little experiment in HA off:

Mi Casa Verde Vera Lite Home Controller
GE 45606 Z-Wave Technology 2-Way Dimmer Switch
GE 45603 Z-Wave Technology Wireless Lighting Control Fluorescent Light & Appliance Module

For now I’m just looking to control the lamp in my den and overhead lighting in the adjacent kitchen. Nothing too exciting really, just enough to get my feet wet and be able to do a simple scene around watching movies. Hopefully amazon will get the stuff here tomorrow so I’ll have the weekend to play…

Fun with TomatoUSB and OpenBSD

Matthew Schick — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:22:42 +0000

With family visiting and a steady stream of folks around the house needing Wifi access, I decided it was about time to finally set up a properly segregated guest SSID to both rate limit and protect my internal hosts from potentially insecure guest devices. As usually happens to me with such projects, I went a bit overboard and ended up with something much more complex but way more fun to manage.

TomatoUSB already has support for multiple SSID configurations, tho it’s considered experimental and doesn’t have full gui support. You’ll also need to either build yourself or use a community build to get the full goodness. I chose Toastman’s builds since it also includes full VLAN support and he’s very active in the community. Installing the latest on my RT-N16 was easy enough and a quick ‘nvram wipe’ gave me a nice clean base to work with. Getting the extra SSID was pretty painless, added the extra vlan and bridge then ssh’d into the router, ran the relevant nvram commands and voila! This is prolly where I should have left it, but in doing my digging I came across this post which details using OpenWRT to create a trunk port carrying all vlans to the OpenBSD router.

Why trunk you may ask? Short answer – because it’s fun. Long answer – single connection required to carry all routable traffic to my OpenBSD box where I can restrict, rate shape, etc. to my heart’s content. Setup here was dead easy, the NIC I was using for my internal network supports 802.1Q so all I had to do was some point and click goodness to tag all three vlans (internal, WAN, wireless guest) into port four on the RT-16N:

I also set the WAN port type to ‘Disabled’ in the basic network config page so the RT-16N wouldn’t try and get an external IP.

Once all that was done, I removed all ip configuration from my internal nic on the router and created the various vlan interfaces:
ifconfig vlan3 create ifconfig vlan3 vlan 3 vlandev xl0 ifconfig vlan3 xxx.xxx.xx.x netmask 255.255.255.0 up

A quick tcpdump showed the right kinds of packets flowing across the new vlan interface, so I created the others (vlan1, vlan2) and then updated the various hostname.* files to reflect the new configs.
hostname.xl0 (interface just needs to be enabled):
up
hostname.vlan1 (static ip):
inet xxx.xxx.xx.x 255.255.255.0 NONE vlan 1 vlandev xl0 description "Interface in trusted VLAN (1)" inet6 alias xxxx:xxx:x:xxx::1 64
hostname.vlan2 (dynamic, used for ISP):
dhcp NONE vlan 2 vlandev xl0 description "Interface in external VLAN (2)"
hostname.vlan3 (static ip, wireless guest subnet):
inet xxx.xxx.xx.x 255.255.255.0 NONE vlan 3 vlandev xl0 description "Interface in wireless guest VLAN (3)"

Yea, this is prolly way more complex than it should be for a home network, but the ability to do proper segregation of various traffic types is a big win in my opinion. The only downside I’ve encountered so far is with rate limiting as a whole. Since PF’s QOS is tied to individual interfaces, I can’t just pool all vlans together and have it shape that way. There’s prolly some way of doing it using static routes or even some virtual device, but I haven’t found it yet. For now I’m just aggressively limiting the bandwidth available to my guest network, but if anyone knows of a better way I’d be grateful for some pointers.

Geeky weekend projects

Matthew Schick — Mon, 09 May 2011 21:30:20 +0000

Had some time on my hands this weekend, so decided to get a few small projects worked out.

IPv6 – Since TWC doesn’t provide native support, got my tunnel setup on my router and using rtadvd to hand out addresses with wide-dhcpv6 providing various dhcp options. I’m just assigning addresses manually for any host I want in DNS for now, might end up attempting some ddns magic at some point if I care enough.
802.11n – Enabling it has been problematic in the past with the default WRT160N firmware. I’d always end up with dropped packets or random ap reboots once I put it under a sustained heavy load. After attempting all the linksys recommended nudges, I replaced their firmware with TomatoUSB. Still had some dropped packets but after switching wifi from 40MHz to 20MHz I’m getting very smooth 80-90Mbps speeds through most of my house.
No Cable! – Dropped Uverse due to their bandwidth capping and moved over to TWC’s DOCSIS for a whopping 30/5Mbps pipe. Decided not to keep cable tv and instead bought a Roku for the streaming stuff I can’t get easily via XBMC or PS3. Nice thing is, since I’m a TWC subscriber, all the base unencrypted channels are still available so we don’t have to put in an antenna for the normal networks and locals. Ended up picking up an HDHomerun box and setting up MythTV along with the XBMC MythBox plugin so we have proper timeshift/PVR as well. Gotta tweak Myth a bit still since playback of higher bitrate stuff is a bit jittery.
Media Hub – Had my old media box sitting unused so decided to put that in our living room primarily for syncing media to/from our various portable devices. Bonus – due to the wireless and Myth changes (and a nice 23″ LCD/LED monitor), I was able to install XBMC on that box and have a perfectly suitable casual viewing spot. And yes, that does include full HD over wireless.

Android Repo Mirroring

Matthew Schick — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:25:16 +0000

Been playing with the CyanogenMod port during pto this week (yummy gingerbread goodness!) and got a crash course in building Android from scratch. Due to the rapid development, I ran into a huge issue pretty quickly when having to nuke/resync the various repos for building. The total space required for a full source build is roughly 14 gigs and requires pulling from a massive number of git repos. Android has a tool named ‘repo’ (info) which makes checking em all out in a cohesive manner very easy, however it’s still a prohibitive time sync to have to pull multiple times. Bit of digging and poking at repo gave me the ‘–mirror’ and ‘–reference’ params. Basically this allows you to initialize a local mirror of an android repo and then point subsequent repo pulls to that local copy.

My example (my tld here is ~/android/):
# make the local mirror directory for upstream android mkdir ~/android/mirror; cd ~/android/mirror # initialize the repo mirror and sync repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git --mirror repo sync -j40
That will take a while, once it’s done it’s time to create the mirror of CyanogenMod sources:
# make local cyanogenmod mirror directory mkdir ~/android/cyanogen/; cd ~/android/cyanogen/ # since I'm building for gingerbread, grab that branch repo init -u git://github.com/CyanogenMod/android.git -b gingerbread --mirror --reference=/path/to/home/android/mirror/ repo sync -j40
This will also take quite some time, note the use of the ‘–reference’ param. This uses my local mirror of the android sources instead of pulling across the network again.

Now I can pull one of the various Captivate repos, using that same ‘–reference’ param (pointed at my local cyanogen mirror) and profit:
# using atinm's repo for Captivate build, just an example at the moment mkdir ~/android/atinm; cd ~/android/atinm repo init -u http://github.com/atinm/android.git --reference=/path/to/home/android/cyanogen/

Success!

XBMC suspend/resume in Maverick

Matthew Schick — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:39:57 +0000

Few updates to my previous post:

The format for the proc interface changed slightly (but significantly) from “disabled” to “*disabled”, scripts must be updated accordingly.
One more step is required, details are in this post, but the short version is that you’ll need to enable wakup for the device at the sysfs level in addition to proc. I used the simple udev rule posted there and all works.

CR-48 and Linux Connectivity

Matthew Schick — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:42:26 +0000

Was one of the luck ones that got a not-so-shiny (matte black actually) ChromeOS netbook from Google this past Friday. The only thing I’ll say here about ChromeOS is that it’s exactly what you’d expect from a browser-based environment.

With the specs on the netbook, my second task (after playing with ChromeOS) was to get a proper full OS installed. Following the instructions on the chromium wiki was pretty boring and worked perfectly. My first install was Meego which, tho very fast, didn’t have nearly the application choices I wanted so I moved on to Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

After the initial configuration I noticed a few rather crucial kernel modules missing from the chrome kernel; namely ppp* and tun. Without those there was no chance at either VPN or mobile broadband usage which limits the usefulness pretty drastically in my case. Luckily the chromium developer docs are pretty easy to follow and I was able to build the needed modules after determining which board (x86-mario) I was building for. Here’s my working result, built against kernel 2.6.32.23+drm33.10 (chromeos version 0.9.128.12 beta). Dropped those in the proper directory, ran depmod -a and now have working vpn (cisco vpnc and openvpn) as well as the built-in verizon broadband.

Quick aside, the broadband is a bit tweaky and has a few caveats. The module doesn’t seem to reinit proper after a suspend/resume cycle and you have to enable within Chrome before it’ll work on the Linux side. I might get around to tracking those down at some point, but I think my next task will be trying to get the touchpad working with all the multi-finger goodness.

Android Backups

Matthew Schick — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:20:20 +0000

After finally retiring my Symbian phones, I’ve moved into the world of Android (*cough*Samsung Captivate*cough*) and digging the flexibility. On thing that always bugged me about my old phones was the lack of a good backup scheme, however with this new beast I’ve found a relatively easy way requiring only root, three apps and a server with ssh and rsync. Here’s how it works.

Apps Required

Titanium Backup Pro – This will backup everything on your phone; apps, contacts, system settings, everything. It’s not free, but the ~$6 (USD) is very much worth while for what it does. It does require root, I’ll leave that to you to get that bit in place.
Rsync backup for Android – Does key authentication, has multiple profile support as well as custom rsync params. Nifty.
Tasker – Used here just to schedule the dumps to the server, however you can do sooooo much more with it. If you have an Android phone, you want this regardless.

Setup
First thing you’ll want to do is create your target account on your server. I won’t go into great detail here, suffice to say I’d highly recommend using rssh and key auth only for this account (chroot ain’t a bad idea either). You don’t want to enable a security risk or allow some $RANDOM to futz with your data.

Once that’s done, open the rsync4android app and generate your keypair. It drops em by default in root of your sdcard directory, best to move em elsewhere (hidden directory) so they aren’t quite so easily accessible. Make sure you have a strong password set for your phone; that keypair will give anyone access to your server account you setup previously so guard as tightly as possible.

Now that you have your keypair, create a new rsync profile. You’ll need to point it to your target host, give it a local directory to sync over as well as a few other options. In my case I’m just grabbing /sdcard/ which also pulls in the external sd. I did have to exclude external_sd/.android_secure since the rsync process doesn’t run as root (very good thing) by adding ‘–exclude=external_sd/.android_secure’ to the ‘Additional rsync options’ field. You could set up various profiles to get a more fine-grained backup of only the unique data, but I’m more interested in keeping a full snapshot. Once you’ve got all the bits filled in, save the profile and do a dry run to make sure everything is set up correctly.

To do the initial sync you have a few options. You can either kick off the full rsync from the phone or sync via usb first to seed the target directories. Which you choose comes down to the amount of data you have to sync over, in my case I had ~25G to sync so I mounted via usb and did the local rsync to save time and battery. Either way, make sure you verify you can actually rsync from your phone to the server via wifi before moving on.

Next step will be configuring Titanium to actually run the system backups. I recommend setting it up with lzo compression, encryption and at least a three backup history. Once you have those preferences set, hit the ‘Schedules’ tab and add/edit the list to match how often and which type(s) of data you want to backup. I’m doing runs (all at 2am) of the ‘Backup all new apps & newer versions’ type on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Sunday and Wednesday nights I do full ‘Backup all user apps + system data’ runs. Go ahead and run the full backup now so you have some seed data.

Scheduling and Automation
So now that we have working backups and syncs, time to pull it together and automate the process.

The rsync4android package includes a Tasker plugin which makes our lives much easier. I set up a profile with two contexts and a single task; the first context is a simple time schedule (3am) and the second verifies I’m on my home wireless network via the ‘Wifi Connected’ state. The task uses the rsync plugin and I’ve selected the single profile I had setup previously. If you have multiple rsync profiles you could add them here as well. I certainly don’t want my sync job kicking off if I’m not at home, it’ll fail anyway but if you’re using a publicly accessible server you could chew through your data plan allowance in a single run if you’re not careful.

To test this beast, simply edit the time context to a minute or two ahead of the current time, save it and wait to watch the magic. Assuming it’s successful, make sure you change the time context back to your chosen sync time and enjoy the feeling of superiority over your backup-less comrades and the security of proper remote backups.

Linode hosting

Matthew Schick — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 01:21:01 +0000

Did a bit of digging a few weeks ago and came across Linode VPS. With better prices than Slicehost, data centers both here in the US as well as the UK and excellent reviews I ended up giving it a spin and eventually moving wholesale. Performance is much better with the new hosting, was able to set up a fully customized OS install (SELinux, encrypted fs) and then duplicate that image over from my primary ATL vm to my secondary in the UK. Yea, I’ve now got a fully distributed setup complete with a hot spare on a different continent (better than most ecommerce sites on the web today) for less than the price of my single Slice.

With a really nice management console and solid (so far) service, this is pretty much the best option I’ve seen in the VPS hosting space. I’d highly recommend it for anyone with a more technical background looking for a full-featured Xen host.