Re: [homenet] About Ted's naming architecture presentation and document

[Tim Chown <[e-mail]>]

On 21 Nov 2016, at 19:34, james woodyatt <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:

On Nov 16, 2016, at 17:31, Michael Richardson <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:

But, do you agree that publishing your home lighting controller to the DNS is
how you manage to control your lights from your phone when you are out of
wifi distance, as you roam to 3G. (I switch to 3G when I get to the front of
my rather modest driveway, as the AP is in the back of the basement)?

If anybody is currently shipping, or has announced plans to ship, any kind of home automation device that does this, please speak up on the mailing list. I’d like to calibrate my perhaps mistaken apprehension that nobody would seriously consider doing this. Everyone I know in this field plans to do this by providing a single public rendezvous point with high availability servers that communicate in turn to home automation controllers acting as private clients.

There are certainly many devices I access directly in my home, e.g. webcams, media servers, but these are not real home automation devices, and not providing “mission critical” functions. They mostly work via web ports and, where IPv4-only, require an amount of port mapping shenanigans. I do have some IPv6 services running in my home that I access remotely.

The challenge with home automation is that there’s a particular need for that service to be both secure and reliable (high uptime). Obviously Mirai has highlighted the problem of insecure IoT in the home, especially through access via default passwords being left in place.

That said, there are examples of home automation companies that have stopped trading, leaving the devices in the home useless. Similarly with some “Internet toys” that require the mothership to still be in orbit for them to work. Non-proprietary devices/protocols are perhaps as important as the architecture itself.

Tim