I recently bought my grandmother’s home in Ormond Beach, FL from the bank and I am looking into renting it to offset some off the costs. I have ordered a Vera 2, three Kwikset deadbolts, one zwave outlet, a CT30 t-stat and an ELK-9200 contactor. The outlet and the contactor are for the water heater. I do not have internet on the site, but i am looking for something inexpensive, possibly ATT DSL. I would like to have wifi for the renters without giving them access to the vera system, but I want to access the house remotely and use the wifi on the vera myself and the wii so we/ renters can get netflix movies.
How should I set this up (a diagram would be very helpful, I know very little about computers)?
Also, I have never set up a wifi for a rented house. I want to make sure that wifi is only accessed by them and not a wiredo (maybe I just watch too much cop shows)
I think that we users have demonstrated beyond dispute that anyone with (a) physical access to, or (b) any kind of web access to, the Vera can obtain full control over it. For (a), hide the Vera, preferably behind a lock.
For (b), you will have to divide your LAN into two subnets, and prevent renters from accessing the subnet that the Vera is on. That means that the Wifi must be provided by a box other than the Vera. If you’re buying a DSL modem-router, buy one with Wifi built in.
Subnetting is not something that most consumer routers provide. You would probably need to buy something designed for small business, or flash OpenWrt onto a consumer router. (Small-business routers also tend to have VPN capability, which I consider to be absolutely essential for remote management.) If you can find something that is designed for Internet cafes, it might have a Wi-fi “captive portal” mode, which probably has built-in firewalling.
This is probably TMI, so the alternative security mechanism is to just ask your renters nicely to stay away from the Vera, physically and on the LAN. Whether that’s good enough security depends on your level of paranoia and the kind of renters you are expecting to get.
Also, I have never set up a wifi for a rented house. I want to make sure that wifi is only accessed by them and not a wiredo
For encryption, use WPA2-PSK (also called WPA2 Personal). Sometimes “WPA2” is written “WPA-AES” or “WPA-CCMP”.
Write the password on a piece of paper and stick it somewhere that only renters can read it.
If the info @futzle gave you is TMI to begin with, i would be carefull to set up your own wifi at a rental place.
Regular more or less unsecure home networks are quite easy to set up these days with equipment “out"of the box”
As soon as security starts playing a role you will HAVE to get into the settings of many devices starting with your router and vera.
You will run into numerous issues that need to be addressed and are better of having someone knowledgable help you out in that case!
Your IT guys or friends can probably help you set up a wireless router with WPA2 protection, if it’s not clear from the manual how to do that (or already set up that way).
Vera also allows you to enable ‘local authentication’ which would require anyone on your LAN to log in.
As @futzle stated, there’s ways around all of this, but if you lock up Vera and/or require authentication, I’d assume it would be clear to any renter that finds Vera, that this is not-to-be-messed-with. It would require ‘intent to get in’ and not an ‘accident’ to gain access.