ozaz1

Hi,

I'm a regular home user (am not an IT or networking professional).

I have a shed at the end of my garden which is out of range of the WiFi router in the house. Because of this, I use a TP-Link powerline adapter to get network connectivity in the shed and at the end of the garden. The adapter provides both WiFi and an ethernet port.

I'd like to limit/control what devices can connect to the ethernet port of that powerline adapter. In the device settings there doesn't appear to be any options to disable the ethernet port or to perform any allow list filtering of devices connected to that port or to the powerline network in general. I could perform allow list filtering at the level of my main router in my house, but I don't want the inconvenience of applying this to my whole network. The ethernet port on the powerline adapter outside the house is the only one I want protection on. I'm not worried about the WiFi network or any ports inside the house.

This leads me to a couple of questions

1. Are there any powerline brands which provide ability to do allow list filtering at the level of the powerline network itself, provide ability to disable individual ethernet ports on powerline adapters, and/or sell adapters which are WiFi only (no ethernet ports).
2. I suspect there is probably something I can install that sits between my main router and the powerline network to enable me to perform allow list filtering of devices attached to the powerline network without having to do it at my main router. But I'm not sure what that would be or what to read up on to set it up. I do have an old spare router in case it could be used for this purpuse.

Any help or guidance would be much appreciated.

Thanks

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I have an outbuilding with power outlets. There's a local circuit breaker within the outbuilding so power in there can go down independently of the house. I want to set something up to monitor for this and notify me if/when it happens. The building does not have ethernet and is out of range of my home WiFi. I have a spare powerline adapter that I'm not using, so my first thought is to use powerline to get an ethernet socket in the outbuilding and run a simple script on a server in my house to ping a networked attached device that I place in the outbuilding. If there's no response it will send me a phone notification (via a service like Pushbullet) prompting me to check on the power in the outbuilding. This leads me to my main question: I need something to ping which can connect to network via ethernet (my powerline adapter does not have WiFi so I can't use a WiFi smart plug for example). Given its sole purpose will be to act as a target for my ping, I'm wondering what's the cheapest thing I can buy for this purpose?

Also, another question: I'm wondering what alternative approach I could take which does not involve ethernet, powerline or WiFi. I'm thinking I could put a microcontroller in the outbuiling and periodically send a non-WiFi wireless transmission to the house. If it fails to arrive, the power is probably out. The outbuilding is about 15-20 metres from the house. It's a wooden building and the house is brick. Would LoRA be the best choice for wireless transmission here? Given I already have a powerline adapter, I expect this wouldn't be as cheap as the powerline option but using a wireless protocol other than WiFi would be a learning exercise that might also be handy for future projects.

Hello,

I want to use a desktop PC as a NAS-like device in a home environment. It will be used as a file-server and backup target for other computers in the household, and it will need to run a cloud backup application (I'm considering Backblaze). I will not be using it to run any VMs or dockers so it does not need to be a powerful device. What I really want is for it use as little power as possible, yet sufficient for the tasks mentioned above.

I know if I use a mini PC I can achieve very low idle power draws of around 5W (when no external storage drives are attached). But I do want to include two or three 3.5" spinning storage drives, ideally attached via SATA instead of USB, so I guess it will have to be a tower PC. However, in my experience tower PCs idle at around 20-30W even before spinning storage drives have been attached (although I've only ever owned a couple of tower PCs, and these were more than 5 years old so I don't know if this is particularly representative).

Are there tower PCs which achieve the same/similar low power consumption as mini PCs (with the only real reason for the larger form factor being to provide more space for expansion)? If so, do you have any suggestions for specific models? Ideally I want to buy something prebuilt with a Windows license. I'm not keen to invest time into a self-build and I'm keen to use Backblaze for the cloud backup, which requires Windows or Mac. Happy to buy used but would like it to be new enough to be officially supported for Windows 11.

However, happy to consider other suggestions which would still enable me to do cloud backup of around 5TB of data for similar price to Backblaze (around $100/year).

Thanks