My Audrey

RIP

Alas, my Audrey went paws up after a lightening spike during a storm. I'm working on other useless projects around the house right now.

The Plan

My plan is to use an Audrey as a kitchen appliance. Mostly, what I want is to be able to

• browse my music collection and remote control the system in the basement to pipe tunes up to the kitchen speakers.
• act as an intercom with the PC's in the house - buttons to page all units or specific rooms. This way I can yell at my kids to come help with dinner without having to wander the house to find them
• pull up recipies from our collection on the household web server
• have a web surfing appliance near the kitchen table
• have a place to sync my palm-phone where my family can see my schedule
• have a spot where we can leave messages for each other - we don't have an answering machine, so the kids can text message a box which the Audrey will read
• ... and some other wierd stuff just for the hack value :)

Implementation

I ordered an Audrey from audreyupgrade.com. I ordered it on a Thursday evening and it arrived on Monday. Pretty snappy.

Mail and Web services

The obvious first thing was to set up mail and web services. Since I run a mail server at home, I set up a new account 'kitchen' so we can mail to only the Audrey. I also had to open up the sendmail.cR file to allow the audrey to relay mail out. This meant a static IP for the Audrey - no real pain since I give static IP's to all the machines in the house.

The web server was more interesting. My plan was

• on the internal zone for my DNS server, add 'home.' as an A record pointing to the internal web server
• make sure the DNS server list on the audrey points to 192.168.1.99 (my internal DNS server) first, before 192.168.1.1 (which is DNS on the router/firewall)
• add 'home' to /etc/hosts as well
• add a virtual host to apache

  
  		# the internal household server
  		<VirtualHost home>
  		ServerName home
  		ServerAlias home.aiu.to
  		ServerAlias home.house
  		ServerAdmin tony@mailhost
  		DocumentRoot /home/httpd/home.house
  		TransferLog /usr/local/apache/logs/home_log
  		</VirtualHost>
  	

Every other machine could resolve "https://home/' just fine, but the Audrey would not. It got '400' errors. The Apache logs showed 'request failed: error reading the headers'. Turns out the problem is a suggested configuration fix to avoid an exploit. I had these lines in httpd.conf

                LimitRequestFields 15
                LimitRequestFieldSize 800