Part 5 – Internet for a boat
This is part 5 of “Internet for a boat.” In case you missed it and want to follow along in order, be sure to check out part 4 here or start at the beginning.
Marine devices
The obvious first choice for connected devices are the components that makeup the core electronic systems on the boat. Most commonly this could be chart plotters, Automatic Identification Systems (AIS), GPS, or MultiFunction Devices (MFDs). More components are moving toward being internet enabled out of the box and with the internet of things (IoTs) still in its infancy, I imagine this trend will only accelerate. Regardless of the existence of actual internet connectivity, it still makes sense to have as many of these devices sharing the same network and communication protocols as possible. Onboard Sea Monster it’s possible to configure AIS to stream data to an iPad app wirelessly connected to the network with no need for internet access.
Tangent: Unfortunately it seems technological advancements in the boating world fall behind elsewhere even when some of the same problems or opportunities exist. For example National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) 2000 devices communicate at 250 kilobits-per-second. There has been a draft proposed to update the underlying protocols and base communications on standard Ethernet connectivity called NMEA OneNet. It seems this is years in the making and from what I can find on NMEA.org, the specification is targeted for Q1 of 2020, so it’s definitely delayed.
Printers and computer peripherals
A friend of mine in the consulting world once told me to get rid of as many peripherals (mice, multiple monitors, speakers, cameras, microphones etc.) as possible, so you can be just as effective working from anywhere. Although it takes a little time to get used to, I highly recommend this strategy and therefor have very few of these types of devices. If you do have something that is an absolute must have and has network connectivity, add it to the network just like any other device. Before we moved aboard, I firmly believed we did not need a printer (I try to be completely digital of course). Luckily, Jordan thought we needed one and having it has definitely changed my opinion. While I prefer a paper free life as much as possible, it seems government agencies, marinas, veterinarians and a host of other organizations can’t live without it. This seems to be truer as you get further into the island life culture. Having the ability to scan, copy and print things has come in handy very often. With that being said, I recommend getting a space efficient and wireless printer. We don’t keep it on all the time, but when we need it, we simply power it on and it reconnects itself to the network. Any device on the network including cell phones, tablets and computers can all wirelessly print with no extra hassle. It’s a one time setup that is well worth doing to make life easier each time you need it.
Cell phones, tablets, computers and other internet enabled devices
I would expect for devices in this category it would be easy to understand why connecting them to a single network on the boat would have great benefits. Devices like cell phones automatically save and attempt to connect to known hotspots without user intervention. It saves so much time to have this done automatically as I come and go from the boat versus sharing a hotspot from a single device like another cell phone.
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
If the router is the heart of the network, the NAS is the brain. In its simplest form a NAS is very similar to an external hard drive. The primary difference is that it is connected to the network and not directly into a single machine like an external hard drive. It is built to be an always on and always available appliance. So as long as the router and network are on, the NAS can be on as well. This gives an added advantage that all users of the network can interact with the storage on the device at the same time. Once the location is mapped, it just looks like a regular drive / folder available for your device. On top of that basic function, many companies have been building in many more features to enhance the capabilities of the NAS to the point where they are now as powerful as a computer and can even act as a server.
Once we knew we would be cruising, I began researching which NAS was right for us. I knew we would be trying to conserve data as much as possible. Even though we currently have many GBs of cellular data per month available before we pay any overages, streaming a single movie can easily consume more than 1 GB and I try to reserve at least 1 GB of data per day for work purposes (though I often use less). Basically I wanted to make sure that we had all the media we could want without needing to consume any data. I also wanted to make sure all the photos and videos we would be taking would be able to be stored safely without needing to upload GBs of data to a cloud provider (for example syncing photos to iCloud uses a lot of data if you are taking a lot of photos). Finally, I wanted to bring as little onboard as possible – No DVDs, blu-rays, cds or books.
After extensive research I decided on the Synology DS718+ which can be found on Amazon here. This unit comes without any actual hard disks. It is up to you to decide how much storage is needed. I bought and installed 2 Western Digital Red 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drives. The installation of the physical drives themselves is very simple and outlined in the Synology setup guide. The DS718+ is configured to use a hybrid RAID 1 configuration, which is why it requires two hard disks of matching size. Each 4 TB hard drive is a mirror of the other. In the cause of a drive failure, I could pull out the failed drive and insert a new one and get the data mirrored back onto the new empty drive. This is sufficient redundancy in my opinion for our needs. The last thing I purchased was a spare fan for the NAS as its one of the few easily replaceable components that can go out and an overheating unit will either shut itself off or continue running hot and potentially cause damage.
Tangent: You can take the number of drives and the way they are mirrored and go crazy with it. RAID 5, 6 or even 10 configurations are common in the IT space, but I seriously doubt the need of it in home or boat networking. This is even more true for our setup as I have taken snapshots of the entire disk and stored that backup on a third disk which could be used in the event of a total failure.
I highly recommend the Synology DS718+. It is very powerful and not only comes with tons of customization options, it also has a fantastic and intuitive web based user dashboard. This device is hooked directly into the LAN onboard. The setup and configuration options could fill out many blog posts, so I will attempt to keep the overall configuration and organization I chose at a very high level. The first thing is to create accounts for access, which can have varying levels of permission. I give Jordan and myself high level rights and create guest access for drive directories for multiple purposes. One guest location allows read only access to a guest user on our network so they can read or copy any files we leave there. Want to borrow a movie? No need for thumb drives or to even be on board. Simply log onto our guest network and access the available network location and you can grab a copy of any file we place there. We have a second location that allows reads and writes. This is similar, but a guest can drop any file for us to retrieve without having access to the other private directories. Speaking of private directories, we have one main entry point for all of our private storage needs. Inside that folder, there are a number of high level folders such as: Audio, AudioBooks, Files, Games, Movies, Music, Photos, TV, Video.
Another important thing I did well before we started cruising was to build, organize and move to the centralized storage afforded by the NAS. I ripped all of the audiobooks, ebooks, music, movies and TV shows Jordan and I owned to create digital copies. Once this was complete, I went out and downloaded anything else I thought we might need or want to have available for the foreseeable future. This was all done legally of course.
Tangent: If you are attempting to be a pirate in the more modern sense of the word and plan to download media under less than legal circumstances, I would recommend you pay the relatively small fee to one of the many public VPN providers out there who advertise they are there to protect your online privacy. At a high level, by using a VPN, you traditionally install a VPN client on your device. This client communicates with specific servers provisioned / owned by the VPN company anywhere around the world. You are usually allowed to select the server you want to connect to and after that process is complete, traffic coming from your machine will be routed through the server you selected. We’ve used VPN services in a quasi-legal way for another purpose – streaming content that is not available in our area. For some reason we have found that major networks in the US will restrict content when our IP address shows that we are out of the country. With a small monthly fee to a VPN provider, I can select a server in Chicago, connect to it, reload my browser and suddenly the streaming service sees the request coming from an IP address in Chicago and allows the content to be played. It’s a nifty little trick with a lot of useful applications. Think about the next time you want to stream an NFL game, but you are not in the market contractually negotiated between the NFL and the big TV network.
Once all this content was digitized, I went through the (hopefully) once in a lifetime process of organizing it. I used a variety of free tools available on the internet to help convert file formats, retrieve and set metadata and even format file or folder names as needed. In the end, if I have a TV show like Seinfeld, I have all the metadata associated with each episode and season including cover images. This was completed for ebooks, TV shows, movies and music. In the end, the collection is massive. I’m not going to go through all the specs, but as an example we have enough music to play it 24 hours per day for about 3 months and never hear the same song again. Now that I have all of this media and its available in a centralized manner on the network, I needed to determine the best way to consume it.
Photos
Photos and videos were an easy choice. I collect and collate the master copy of all photos and videos we take whether it be on one of our GoPros or phones. Once I get it to my device, I allow the Mac Photos app to do all the syncing and organizing. The most important thing I did was to move the photos library to the NAS. Now there is no storage limitation and my computer has none of these files which have lots of personal value (I could lose my computer tomorrow and not lose a single photo).
Music, iTunes and a stereo system
I did essentially the same process with the files iTunes manages. Now the iTunes library is located on the NAS and I simply connect to the library with my laptop’s iTunes and stream to our bluetooth stereo onboard. (PLEX does come with an iTunes server which can callow you to share your music collection without the chance of another user changing anything. Given our current configuration, this is not a priority for me). Alternately, Synology provides a phone / tablet app that’s very similar to the music app on your phone. Once you download it and tell it where to look on the network for your Synology based music, it’s visible in the app and can be streamed / heard in the same fashion as any other music playing on your phone.
Electronic Books
Ebooks are easy as they are all located in one large library in their own directory on the NAS. Getting them onto a kindle is pretty straight forward. The last remaining challenge is TV shows and movies. For this, the ultimate solution is PLEX.
PLEX!
PLEX is an amazing project that may people don’t know about or understand how to leverage. In a nutshell PLEX allows you to create and consume something that looks like your own personal Netflix loaded with your digital content! There are two primary components to a working PLEX system. There is a PLEX server and a PLEX client. The PLEX server is an application you can install on a variety of operations systems. Luckily for us, if you choose a Synology based NAS, there is a PLEX server app installable for free at the click of a button using the built in Synology Disk Station Manager. Once the server is installed, there is very little to configure. What is important is that your media files (in our case TV shows and Movies) are named with the PLEX naming convention for TV shows or Movies (this should be done during the media organization step I mentioned before). Once this is complete, you simply configure the PLEX server to point to the directory where your media types are located. The server application then scans the folders and indexes all the metadata.
One hiccup to avoid is that by default PLEX requires you to have an active internet connection to sign into your own PLEX server. The first time you setup PLEX you will need to create an account online. Their idea is that if you have an always on internet connection from a big internet service provider like most land residences, you could sign on through their portal which then securely connects you to your own PLEX server which might be on your own home network. For example you could have a PLEX client installed on an iPad with a good internet connection at a hotel somewhere, sign in through the PLEX website and watch content on your PLEX server / NAS back at home. As one of the main purposes of having this media on a boat is to avoid the requirement of having access to internet, we need to allow our client to connect to our PLEX server anytime regardless of internet. To do this, you must have your PLEX server connect to the internet the first time. You only have to do this one time, but you are required to sign into your PLEX account and set a list of IP ranges which do not require signing in through the PLEX website to access your server. To complete this, log into your PLEX account through the PLEX website with your PLEX server running on the same network then navigate to settings, advanced, network and click show advanced. Scroll down the page and look for a field that says “List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth”. In this field add a list of IP addresses IP/netmask entries. This is not as tricky as it sounds. If my router has an IP of 192.168.50.1 and 255.255.255.0, then I would enter those values separated by a slash and save the changes. Once this is complete, you can disconnect from the internet for as long as you want and still access your local PLEX server on your network.
The second component needed to actually consume media being provided from your PLEX server is a PLEX client. This is where PLEX truly shines. There are PLEX clients out there for every major device I can think of. We bought a new 32” Samsung smart TV when we bought the boat. I used the Samsung app search feature and easily found and installed a free PLEX client. Our second TV in the master berth is much smaller and not a smart tv. It does however have USB and HDMI ports. We bought a basic Amazon Fire Stick, installed a PLEX client on it and plugged it into the TV. There are clients for many more devices as well.
Tangent: I’ve become obsessed with being fully digital! I have small portable scanner and previously scanned in all important paperwork and documents. Going forward, once I accumulate a small pile of paperwork I want to keep, I scan them in as well, digitally organize them, then throw away / recycle the paper. I highly recommend trying to become as digital as possible. It is very liberating and saves lots of space regardless of where you live.
With our current setup complete, we have everything being organized, stored and served from one central network location. I think of it as our own personal cloud. Ebooks can be browsed directly from our library, our personal photos and videos can be viewed / organized from any device, our music library can be streamed from iTunes and all of our TV shows and Movies are accessible on our own personal PLEX server which gives it a Netflix like experience!
One final thought. This configuration works great for a boat, but it is even better on land if you have access to standard internet provided by an ISP in the US. I plan to keep using it and extend it once our sailing days take a pause. Stay tuned for the final post where I will detail how to connect everything all together – Internet for a Boat – Part 6
