jadz

Last weekend I went to a (home) hardware auction at the Nick’s and Ding’s hardware store on Herring Cove Road. Nick’s and Ding’s is closing their doors and were selling off all their floor models and select items from their warehouse. I picked up a lovely vanity ($175.00 - estimated value of $600.00) as well as a Garden Door ($400.00 - estimated value of $650.00). These things have obvious use in the house.

I’ve also been looking for a thermostat that I can connect to my home computer in order to monitor the house temperature and the furnace usage. After being disappointed with what I could find locally, I picked up an 8 port USB relay and a USB Thermometer.

I’m more confident in the relay than I am in the thermometer, and I’m not that confident in the whole system, but we’ll soon see how hard it is to jig them together.

In an attempt to get my 1st generation xbox (for XBMC) running on my wireless home network, so I started to look at wireless bridges. Then I realized that for the price of a wireless bridge you can get a WRT54GL, which will bridge a wireless network (with the right firmware) and also do lots of other interesting stuff.

I ended up using the DD-WRT as the software running on my WRT54GL, which gave me the option of also running OpenVPN on the router. Many commercial routers will allow VPN passthrough to another device that is running the actual VPN, but with DD-WRT you run the VPN on the router itself.

This means that I can securely connect to my home network and have access to all of the devices in my home (servers desktops etc). This isn’t all that much unlike SSH’ing into my FreeBSD machine and then connecting from there, but it is much more convenient in that I can just use Windows Explorer to browse to network shares and I can use RDP without having to setup SSH tunnelling.

Essentially I have a fully functional VPN in my home for $50 bucks. Good stuff.