Welcome

The Black Horse was a licensed Inn until the late 1970's,  parts of which date back 400 years or so. A comprehensive range of systems is installed for control and monitoring of the house and gardens and for completely flexible "whole-house" Audio and Video.

The house is run by eight managed Windows XP Professional Servers with 15Tb of RAID storage, dual wired whole house Gigabit and Fast Ethernet networks (with saturation 802.1b/g WiFi coverage over the 1.5 acres grounds for mobile access). 

The servers consist of 3 Media Servers with connectivity to eight central analogue and 3 digital tuners and every other possible media source.  One Media Server doubles as the primary 6Tb File and Backup server. This is supplemented by a 3Tb Archive Server.  The Media Server outputs are available on every PC, TV, Hi-Fi and network Media Device in the house via the Ethernet, AV and UHF networks.   The 3 Application Servers, each with 2Tb of storage, control and process everything else including the surveillance, automation and environment monitoring systems .  A Comms Server provides Mail, Fax and VOIP (via the house PABX) gateways.  Finally a Management Server provides central management and monitoring of all of the servers, UPS's, LANs, WAN and WLANs and major connected devices via an Enterprise Operations Management Suite.

The Windows Servers are connected to literally thousands of devices (from irrigation microjets to  surveillance cameras, security, embedded microphones, telephony, lighting, TVs and Pool Cleaners etc) throughout the property by approximately 50,000m of network and high-quality signal cable and over 100 wireless links. The servers have enterprise grade PSUs and cooling fans (eight each).  All servers and key network devices are protected by 3 banks of network managed UPS's (5Kva) providing filtered power and up to 30 mins blackout runtime (although the servers are set to auto shutdown after 5 mins).  An external environment management system (in addition to the internal server thermal control) monitors power and temperature in all equipment locations and interfaces with additional cooling devices etc.  This is supplemented  by 20,000 BTU of Air Conditioning in the 2 main equipment locations. 

The systems are normally used in the house itself via "10 foot" Windows MCE type interfaces (provided by Network Client applications running on each room's workstation and/or TV) using wireless remote controls, which are also the most convenient method of manually controlling the automated lighting etc. 

However the key systems that users would normally use also have their own Webserver, so they are also available via the internet anywhere in the world (but with slightly less functions and without the "10 foot" interface).   Remote application access is very simple via unique URLs and extensive use of Multi-NAT routing of a /28 subnet of public IP addresses.  Routine Web and remote admin access is via normal NAT. 

Please choose a menu option on the left.

Please note that access to some of the Control and Security Systems (eg for electrical appliances or the yacht autopilot etc) is restricted for non validated IP addresses for safety and security reasons- please see Contacts for temporary access.