Home Is Home: The Physical Practicalities - Smart Home Automation with Linux and Raspberry Pi - page 142

N Note If your private server supports multiple domains, the name that is specified here to sshd must be the canonical one.

You can extend this idea by controlling your house through an alternate protocol, such as Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP), from a remote server, although this does open up two potential points of attack.

Adding to Your Home
The simplest way to incorporate automation into your home is through wireless—or at the least, automation that uses
no new wiring. This second approach covers a surprisingly large amount of ground, including networking through
WiFi and Ethernet over Power, appliance control (with X10 over the existing power cables), and media distribution
(with TV senders.)
But even then, with so many devices occupying the 2.4GHz range, there will be a limit to what is possible and
how far it can be expanded. So, naturally, a wired approach will begin to win favor, which will require some drilling of
holes and running of cables.
In all the advice that follows, remember that you must always plan ahead, thinking about what each room will
have in it, what it could have in it next year, and how it will be used. Running cables is a time-consuming process
and not something that wants to be repeated, so it's better to lay too many and have unused sockets than it is to run
out when you attempt to plug in a new gadget and find that you first need to buy an expanded unit. Cable is, after all,
comparatively cheap when compared to the cost of installation or maintenance. Having two cables is a also useful
redundancy measure in all the following examples, if you have the space to include them.

General Considerations
Except in very esoteric cases, Node0 will always be at the center of your HA installation. Even if it is not physically
close to the center of the house, all cables should be run into it. This is known as a star configuration .
The process of running cables from one location to another is known as pulling cables , since it involves the act of
pulling them through one set of holes to another. When you're adding to an existing home, you will generally need to
drill holes in the ceilings and pull cables down through wall-mounted trunking, as shown in Figure 4-1 . With self-builds,
you may have the opportunity to place the cables inside the walls themselves, making them invisible except for the
wall plate beside the skirting board. Of course, if you're doing some major redecorating, then you might decide it's
worth removing the wall and replastering to make the cabling invisible.