Smart Home tips.

-
Smart home technology is becoming ever more popular.  But everyone forgets about one key component that can ruin your experience. 

Your home router.  

Most people who are not tech savvy use their providers router.   These are typically capable of handling up to 6 devices without major slow downs.   Once you add that 7th device, things become sluggish.  Add 8 and your network may seem downright slow.   

My home has about 18 devices 7-12 of which are active all the time.   I use a mid-high end ASUS router with 8 antenna and 3 networks across multiple channels.   I divide my traffic up by putting TV's, Lights, and other appliance types on 1 network.   

I put computers, desktop and laptops on the second wireless network.

And my phones and kids tablets are on the third network.   I also have an Akita Smart home Monitoring device in addition to my routers packet inspection and firewall features.   

I also enable all the default firewall capabilities of every device (where applicable). 

Find out your routers capabilities before adding more devices.  You might be surprised by how much bandwidth.  

Here is a quick checklist to determine how many devices you have. 
Smart Phone.
Smart TV
Smart lights
Smartt appliances
Smart locks
Home Security system
Kindle, Android, iOS devices. (Tablets)
Laptop computers
Desktop Computers
Smart home speakers (Alexa, Google)
Smart home displays (
Smart thermostats (nest, etc.)

Every one of these devices uses up some of your bandwidth.  Everyone is a potential vector for malicious people to hack your home.

Also, you probably want to stick to devices that are all compatible with whatever you use as your primary home device, be it Alexa, google, or Siri.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Virtualization: What is it and do I need it?

-
There is a lot of talk about Virtual Machines now but the reality is that it's not for everyone.  TLDR:  Do you play online or graphic intensive games? Don't use a VM.               Do you do heavy video editing or work?  Don't use a VM.               Do you browse on the web ALOT?  It might be a good idea to use a VM.               Do you watch a lot of porn? It might be a good idea to use a VM. Now, for a more in depth look at when and why to virtualize a computer.  Let's say you are heavily into gaming, but you want to keep your work stuff separate from your gaming stuff.  So on your Windows computer you create a Virtual Machine which is basically a computer within the computer.  Microsoft does this through a special service called Hyper-V which is just a fancy name for software based hardware. There are other virtual machine vendors out there like VMware, Virtual Box, Parallels. What a virtual machine does is create a virtual physical computer which you c
Read more

How to copy large files faster.

-
Over many years I have tried dozens of different methods to copy large amounts of files. On home small networks windows drag and drop is sufficient.  But when you start moving 500+gigs and 100k files, you want something more robust. The clear winner is still Robocopy. If you haven't used Robocopy or are afraid of the command line, use winRobocopy.  It is free and builds the command line for you. The reason I recommend Robocopy is MULTI-THREADED.  Windows Drag and Drop uses between 1-8 threads to copy files. Robocopy can be set as high as 128.  This can change 1 day copies to just a few hours. This means it uses 128 channels so is effectively copying up to 128 files or segments of files simultaneously.  There are many additional switches you can use and this GUI makes it really easy to build commands and then copy and paste into the command line.  http://www.upway2late.com/#/projects/winrobocopy  #sysadmin #techtools #techutilities
Read more