Home Networking Woes

Last week I've reached an important milestone in a lifetime long project of setting up a (multi) home network by setting up an IPSEC tunnel between two distant locations. Actually the real distance is not really THAT far - about a half an hour drive, but in Internet terms they could be separated by an ocean. I do not have too many practical applications for this setup yet, the entire project is mixed fun and education. There are many hosts on both networks, most of them are tiny dedicated computers, doing their everyday jobs. Among them are NAS servers (replicating contents between the two locations, using rsync protocol). Or weather sensors, talking over IP to the central data collecting unit, that also does charting and other calculations. There are cameras set up, so staying in the city during winter I can have a look at my summer country cottage. There are digital satellite receivers sharing crypto cards, so we can watch TV in either location, without physically taking the equipment with us. (I know this is illegal, but really I do not feel like I hurt the broadcasters with that, as I personally can watch only one TV at a time...).

All this is configured by means of fragile routing tables and a number of other configuration settings. Actually the most important part of the system is a table (actually two tables) of DHCP static hosts, assigning each device a unique IP address based on it's Ethernet MAC. I do not have a DNS service, so I have to refer to every host by it's IP address - that is why I want them static - to be ale to memorize the setup. The garden webcam cannot be referred to as http://garden.webcam, instead I have to use addresses like http://192.168.37.135. Surprisingly you can memorize these things, but definitely a local DNS would help (may be this should be the next milestone to reach - any suggestions?).

With my experiment I now clearly see one of the barriers to introduce new networked consumer gadgets to the market. Every WiFi access point, every webcam or NAS drive needs a local IP address. And people who make them have no idea how your home network is configured. Some of them ship their products with DHCP (dynamic IP configuration) enabled. But it really does not help - you plug the device int the network, your router assigns a next available IP address to it, and you still do not know THAT address. Some vendors (like Linksys) equip their gadgets with small LCD displays showing current IP address. Some decide to ship their products with DHCP disabled, printing the factory - assigned IP addresses in the setup documentation. But this really does not help, as some of use have 192.168.0.0/24 networks, some have 192.168.1.0/24, and I have 192.168.37.0/24 (I use this notation intentionally, to show the pint how difficult for usual consumers it is to configure TCP/IP networking).

So there is an idea of a product, may be you wiull like it... An integrated DHCP/DNS Home Server (DDHS). Equipped with a LCD screen and a keyboard, it constantly watches for new devices on the network. So imagine you bring this new IP gadget home and turn it on, plugging to the network. The screen notifies you about the presence of a new gadget and asks to assign it a local IP and NAME. Then it stores the IP in the static DHCP table an the name in the DNS database. Since this moment you are free to fire up any web browser and type http:// followed by either the IP or the NAME you've just configured, to access the gadget.

Of course this could be physical appliance or just a software feature of an existing home router / gateway, provided it can be easily accessed. Anybody with such a feature in their roadmap? Linksys? Belkin? DLink? Or open source communities and contributors? I volunteer to be your beta tester and pledge to offer marketing help by means of this blog :)