Before I start posting about all of my home networking projects, I should probably describe the home and property. This is it:

The lot is 1.5 acres, roughly 180×400 if it were perfectly rectangular, with the front of the house about 120′ from the road. The house itself is the standard 40×30 box on a crawl space, with another 25×30 of garage / utility room and bonus room above. An addition off the garage provides a larger living room with a high vaulted ceiling. There’s attic access in the main part of the house, knee wall access on either side of the bonus room, and from the back side I can reach the living room’s attic space. There’s also some attic above the bonus room but the a/c ducts leave no room to get in there.

There’s a detached garage that was converted to a 2-bedroom apartment and came with tenants who pay half my mortgage. It also has attic access.

There’s a pool house that is basically a glorified shed. There’s an open area in the middle with small rooms to either side. One had been a proper bathroom but at some point in the past vandals ripped out the copper pipes.

So that’s what I’m working with. I have plans to bring Ethernet and in-wall access points to several rooms, blast WiFi across as much of the outdoors as I can reasonably manage, use 60GHz PtMP gear as wireless backhaul links for all three structures, give my tenants their own access point in the apartment, and much more.

My next post will be about deploying the PtMP gear.

I’ve recently discovered Chromebooks:

Ok, it’s not like I just heard about them, but it was over the past few weeks that I realized they can serve a useful purpose.

1. I needed a cheap portal serial terminal. Beagle Term and a cheap USB -> RJ45 serial cable fit the bill perfectly.
2. I wanted a device to leave at my girlfriend’s for casual use. Never cared to Android tablets, didn’t want to spend real money on an iPad or a Windows tablet with a decent CPU. The Chromebook works nicely for this.
3. The girlfriend’s kids have started 3rd grade and need access to a computer for school assignments. Was going to give them one of these Chromebooks… but she’d prefer they use something not portable and eventually I snagged a good eBay deal on an LG Chromebase instead.
4. My mother needs access to a computer. For both her and the kids, giving them a computing environment that’s real difficult to screw up is high on the priority list. ChromeOS is perfect for this.

My Chromebook of choice is the Asus C300SA — 3lbs, 13.3″ screen, 4GB RAM, and a legit 10+ hours of battery life. The best part is that Amazon regularly offers reboxed returns at a low price, I’ve picked up four for $100-$115/ea.

Weak points are the sub-1080p display, non-backlit keyboard, and of course, the N3060 dual-core CPU (~989 CPU Mark score). Not gonna sugar-coat it, this thing strains under the load of 10-20 browser tabs I routinely have open… but it does far better than those cheap Windows tablets on Z-series Atom quad-cores.

Apps are also a weakness. For the kids and mom, the browser is all they really need. For myself… I need more, and I’m not real impressed with the selection and quality of what’s available in the Chrome Store in the categories I care about. I don’t want to go the Crouton / Linux route either, as that disables many of the security features of ChromeOS. I think I’d be happiest using the Chromebooks as thin clients to Windows. Guacamole and the various Chrome RDP clients haven’t been appealing to me from a UX perspective, so I’ll be digging into Horizon next.

Regardless, for $100-ish the Pros far outweigh the Cons. They’re not good enough to be my only PC, but they are good enough to be the only PC that I take with me.