Moving from mControl 3 (Windows) to Indigo 6 (OS X) for Home Automation

The Short Version: I moved VPN, home automation control, and video recording from an ASUS eeeBox PC (Windows) to my iMac (OS X Mountain Lion). VPN was changed from PPTP to L2TP using iVPN to control the server. Video recording is with the same program (Vitamin D Video Pro) using the same license. mControl was dropped and I’m now using Indigo 6 to control everything.

For home automation control I’ve been running mControl over the past few years. The development team rarely updated the software but rather than invest in a different package I went ahead and upgraded to version 3 when it was released. The software was running on an ASUS system I had setup at the house for managing home automation and security video recording.

Plugable USB 2.0 to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

Several months ago I lost some network ports on different devices due to a power surge from a nearby lightning strike. Unfortunately, one of the devices that took a hit was the ASUS system I’m using for managing home automation. After the surge I configured the system to use wifi but it was struggling to keep up with network traffic (the system does more than just manage my home automation setup).

After I while I decided to purchase a Plugable USB 2.0 to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter. It’s worked great ever since and as far as I can tell I haven’t had any new problems with the system (and bandwidth has clearly improved over the wifi connection). The device retails from Amazon for about $25.

Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router N900 Media Stream (EA4500)

A while back I purchased an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station to serve as our primary router and wireless access point. Though initially impressed, I learned that this expensive device wasn’t capable of fully permitting incoming PPTP VPN connections. In addition, it didn’t provide many configuration options. To work around this problem I purchased an ASUS wireless router and instead used the Airport as a wireless access point.

The final work-around resulted in two network devices where one could have worked just fine (I continued to use the Apple Extreme instead of only the ASUS wireless router because the Apple device offered better wireless range). I wasn’t thrilled with this setup and wireless covered was still lacking so I added a new device to my wishlist for Christmas, which I received.

We’re now using a Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router N900 Media Stream (EA4500). I was impressed with this model beforehand when my in-laws changed their router to one of these and I had a chance to work with it a bit. Since setting up our router I’ve removed the ASUS wireless router and the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station.

There are several features I haven’t used yet such as the ability to connect an external hard drive. The following are a few things I’ve learned about this router since installing it.

Waking Wireless Speakers from Standby for Audio Output (Windows 7)

I recently purchased a set of wireless speakers, which I’ve connected to my ASUS EeeBox PC. They work well but I have encountered a problem that is common to wireless speakers – they go into a standby mode and require a few seconds to initialize. For playing music this isn’t a problem. However, using the speakers for text-to-speech can be a problem as the speakers may not initialize before the computer has finished speaking. In addition, Windows text-to-speech output doesn’t seem to have a signal strong enough to wake up the speakers anyway.

Upgrading an ASUS EeeBox PC EB1006 Hard Drive (and Copying Partitions)

I still had about 70 GBs of free space on the ASUS. However, I needed more free space to add movies, or more likely, add my wife’s music to its iTunes library.

Rather then spend money on a new hard drive this month I decided to re-purpose an external, portable drive. Typically, the small portable drives are nothing more than a drive enclosure with a 2.5″ SATA hard drive. The ASUS drive was somewhere around 150 GBs. The USB external drive was 250 GBs.

I didn’t take photos of the process, but the actual drive swapping isn’t very complicated and I’m sure there are already numerous guides available on the Web.

Moving an iTunes Library from OS X to Windows

This was done using OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), Windows 7 Professional, and iTunes 10 on both systems. It may work just fine on different versions of the operating systems and iTunes, but I don’t know for certain.

I wanted to move a copy of my rather large iTunes library from the Mac over to the Windows system, which is always on. While it’s easy to setup Home Sharing and then initiate an import of all music over the network, there doesn’t seem to be a way to sync the playlists. I may be mistaken, but I could have sworn that when I first enabled Home Sharing I was able to sync my entire library and playlists from an OS X 10.6 system over to another system running 10.5 (with both running the latest version of iTunes at the time).

Unfortunately, only the files synced with the Windows system. I couldn’t find an easy method for copying playlists that didn’t involve a third-party program.

I decided to take a more direct route and just copy my entire iTunes library manually. To do this I pushed a copy of everything within the iTunes folder to a network drive, deleted everything within the Music\iTunes folder under the Windows account, and then pasted a copy of my library into the Windows iTunes folder.

Note: This will only work if your media is stored within the iTunes folder. If you’ve always had have the option under Advanced to Copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to library then you may already be in good shape.

The next time I fired up iTunes in Windows I had my media and the playlists I had setup on the Mac. The only thing I had to change after copying was the name of the iTunes library – it had also copied that from the Mac.

The information and artwork for my movies transferred, but the movie files did not because they were not stored within the iTunes folder. This was expected and preferred – the ASUS hard drive isn’t large enough to also accommodate the movies (I may upgrade the drive in a few months so I can also store the movies there).

I haven’t used the library much but it appears to be working fine.

Accessing Two Different Windows Shares With Different Credentials Simultaneously From The Same Server

Perhaps I was aware of this restriction a long time ago, when I used a Windows system as my primary desktop, but I completely forgot this. Windows does not permit accessing two different shares that use different credentials when they exist on the same system. There may be more to it than that. For example, it may only apply to a Windows user account logged into a desktop system.

Regardless of the details, I wasn’t able to access two shares on a network drive from the ASUS (Windows 7). Every time I tried to connect to the second share I’d receive a vague error message stating that the connection couldn’t be made. I knew the credentials I was using were correct.

One solution is to disconnect the first share and then connect to the other one. However, I was using that share for the Windows system backup and I didn’t want to bother with having to remove the connection and then re-establish it.

After searching a few pages and forums I came across one post in the Microsoft TechNet forums that explained a workaround. That this even works is laughable, but it really does. User Mustafa Radha explains that using the IP address for one share, and then using the network name for the other share, will work. Indeed it does.

For example, assume I’m trying to connect to a machine named “Server” with an IP address of 192.168.1.2, and it has two shares named “Photos” and “Documents”. You could access both shares at the same time by using these paths:

\\Server\Photos\
\\192.168.1.2\Documents\

Of course, you could swap the IP and name as desired.

Source: Microsoft TechNet – Connecting to multiple shares on a single server with multiple credentials? (System Error 1219)

Schooners II – Weatherproof Wireless Full Range Speakers (Grace Digital Audio)

Almost four years ago I dabbled in a brief project with the goal of using a set of wireless speakers so I could hear notifications from my computer. That project failed, mostly due to the hardware I chose. Admittedly, I never put much effort into it.

Recently, I decided to revive this concept to enhance my interaction the new ASUS EeeBox PC, especially since I’m planning to use Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech for various tasks and notifications. Having just one set of speakers at the computer wouldn’t do. I wanted to have at least a couple of speakers around the house.

On the old home automation system I had a setup that, when a motion sensor was first triggered after a certain time on a weekday, would cause the computer to play a one minute clip from a different 80s song. It was just a bit of fun to help the two of us relax after long days at work. The combination of software did work. However, the audio could only be played from the one room, on the far side of the house. With my new speaker setup this would have more of an impact.

ASUS EeeBox PC (EB1006), Boxee and Netflix Experience (Unacceptable)

I have three projects for the ASUS EeeBox PC that I have yet to spend much time on: speech recognition, text-to-speech, and serving media files as an HTPC. Tonight I finally spent a few minutes with Boxee. This was the first night that I attempted to play any kind of video using Boxee and in this case I only used the Netflix app. I have yet to try ripped DVDs or other video content in Boxee, iTunes, or XBMC.

The Netflix Boxee app didn’t perform well on my system. The audio didn’t sound great, though I had set Boxee to play audio through the HDMI connection but for some reason it only used the speakers. The video streaming was very bad. It was choppy and stuttered a lot.

It’s difficult to know whether the problem is the Boxee Netflix app, using Boxee itself, or simply the fact that the ASUS EeeBox PC just may not have enough horsepower. After all, the ASUS isn’t a high-end system and running additional software on it probably doesn’t help.

I’ll continue this experiment and post updates as I learn more. However, I may jump ahead to working with XBMC and go back to Boxee if I don’t like the results.

Updated 08/24/2011: I briefly tested Netflix Instant Watch from Internet Explorer on the ASUS EeeBox PC and it seemed to run fine. The streaming problem I experienced appears to be limited to Boxee or the Netflix plugin for Boxee. There may be other factors involved, but it’s unlikely I’ll spend any time in the immediate future to identify the specific problem.

How I Made the Airport Extreme Base Station “Play Nice” with an ASUS WL-520GU Wireless Router

A while back I discovered that the Airport Extreme Base Station wouldn’t properly handle an incoming PPTP VPN connection. Recently, because I moved my home automation setup to an ASUS EeeBox PC, I decided to switch back to PPTP by using an ASUS wireless router.

My goal was to have the AEBS continue to manage the wireless network and provide the included high-speed Ethernet ports. On the other side, the new ASUS router would handle the typical functions of a resdential router (firewall, DHCP, port forwarding, etc).

So far this setup has worked without any hiccups.

Configuring the AEBS for this setup was simple. I only had to change one setting.

Open the Airport Utility
Choose Manual Setup
Select the Internet button at the top
In the Connection Sharing drop-down choose Off (Bridge Mode)
Update

I made one other configuration change, though this is optional. I wanted to manually assign the AEBS’s LAN IP so I went into the TCP/IP tab, changed the Configure IPv4 option to Manually, and set the appropriate IP information (in this case the Router Address points to the ASUS router).

Updated 09/14/2011: So far I haven’t had any problems with this setup. The two devices seem to be working well together.

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