Here’s a quick one, ever thought of taking some existing phone extension wiring and converting for use in ethernet networking?
Since moving in I’ve had an analogue phone extension socket in the bedroom. The cable runs outside and down the side of the house, before returning into the house close to the BT master socket. It was connected, but was immediately removed to get the best internet speed at the master.
It has 3 pairs of copper, one pair short of what is needed for traditional Cat5 cable, but it is feasible to get 100Mbps from just 2 pairs, all I need to physically connect my Raspberry Pi media player in the bedroom to my network.
There’s nothing wrong with connecting it up, right?
Unexpectedly and to much excitement, my home internet is now provided via FTTP.
For background, I was previously in a FTTC environment getting average speeds due to my distance from the cab, however good enough to assumably be overlooked for the next phase of the Openreach Ultrafast rollout. Not that I’m complaining, 2020 is the year my speed gets a much-needed boost.
2020 also turns out to be the inaugural international work from home year, so had the opportunity to have a front seat view from my home office on the activity and timeline that brought FTTP home.
I’d like to share my observations and timeline as an example of what you can expect should you get the inkling of fibre coming to your street soon.
Before we get started, as my expectations rose, I found this post by Andy’s World invaluable for identifying activity and helping me confirm that FTTP was on its way.
In a series of events that I thought wouldn’t have happened for many years, FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) has just become available to my home. With available speeds of 1000/330Mbps available the temptation is to go for the maximum, but will my current infrastructure actually deliver what’s on offer?
My current router is a Draytek 2862ac, which has an advertised 400Mbps throughput at the WAN, but what can it actually achieve in the real world? This will be the basis on choosing a FTTP speed profile.
Speed testing a router can be setup with a couple of laptops…
Following the setup of a Cent OS CCTV server, I’ve been using Raspberry Pi’s as video sources. But what if there was a Raspberry Pi in perfect situ for a CCTV camera, but was already in use as a media player?
A Linux system has always had the impression that it is
versatile, so this should be an achievable task. A barrier would be how to get
this done with the operating system installed, in this case it is LibreElec, an
OS with the tagline “Just enough OS for Kodi”. Therefore, it would be more of a
challenge than a usual Debian install.
The team at LibreElec saw this type of thing coming, and included the Docker service as a Kodi addon to allow the curious tinkerer to add more than Kodi to a Pi.
If you have the LibreElec based Pi in the opportune
placement to add a camera, here is how to add Mjpeg streaming capabilities…
If you’d ever searched for Raspberry Pi projects that
involved a camera then the results would certainly include Motioneye OS, an
easy to use self-contained operating system that is truly (write then) plug and
play.
Looking for a CCTV project earlier this year I too was drawn in by this, and with my small abundance of RPi spares it was the cheapest choice, using a couple of RPi 3B+ for video, and a Zero W for time-lapse image capture. All processing was self-contained on each Pi with capture data passed over via SMB to a Windows file share.
This worked, but had a couple of problems that prevented it
from being trustworthy. Firstly, it stops recording video after a few days of
uptime, by creating empty files. And secondly the time-lapse camera seemed to
reset every few minutes that created in white out image capture as the camera’s
exposure setting recalibrated, ruining a time-lapse video.
Looking wider there was also the performance issue. In
Motioneye OS’ default state of managing all features, the highest FPS seemed to
max at 15 fps even on the Pi 3B+. Forums suggest this is due to the motion eye
daemon handling all the image processing in software, putting a strain on the Pi’s
modest CPU.
The idea and goal is to move the processing and IO
responsibilities to my server, which would be far more capable than the then
latest available RPi, and as I have chosen Cent OS to be my go-to Linux OS of
choice, this is what I’ll be using.
A gateway to make this possible is an option in Motioneye OS, Fast Network Camera. This when set relinquishes the Pi of all processing duties and serves to just stream the camera capture as best as possible via MJPEG.
Here’s how to set up Motioneye on a Cent OS server to be a central data hub for a network of RPi Motioneye OS cameras.
Before we start, a story. When I created my first web server, I’d found a copy of Windows NT Server 4.0, upgraded it to Service Pack 6a to get IIS enabled, opened port 80 on the router and viola, working webserver. This was 2001 and unfortunately my creation of a webserver coincided with the spread of the Code Red virus, and it reached my server within days of it being online.
Not knowing at the time, and thinking it was a one off,
formatted the hard drive and completed the whole setup again. A day passed
before the virus was back. Now with the knowledge of what was happening and wary
of it happening again. I rebuilt the server and this time put the website
behind port 8080, this time the virus never returned.
I thought to myself that this was security through
obscurity, and with the victory over Code Red, was something I held onto for
many years.
I applied this method when it came to opening RDP access to
the outside world, choosing a seemingly obscure port 8021 on each network
setup. However, I’ve been dealt a wakeup call following what I’ve just seen…
Living in a block of flats is a nightmare when it comes to getting reliable wireless network coverage, especially when only having 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi as it is a heavily congested frequency. Over the last few months I’ve found the connection constantly dropping on my wireless devices, even within a few feet of the access point.
I use a Netgear FVS318N for my wireless connections and a frustration is that the region is locked to Europe, where the radio power is limited more than other parts of the world.
This means the highest achievable power is half, raising it to full results in this dead end:
Very annoying, this post shows how to get a region locked Netgear use all the power available, and to discover what devices in the area are competing for the wireless space.
