Ethernet over Power with the HomePlug NP200AV

We are renting a house - quite an old brick house with no basement, ornate plaster ceilings, and huge brick fireplaces throughout.

When I went to get cable broadband installed this posed a problem. How could I get high-speed network access from one side of the house to other without laying cable? I'd previously set up a WLAN across the house, but although the house isn't huge, those brick chimneys took their toll, reducing signal strength across the width of the house to the point where it was slow and unreliable. As this would affect access to my main daily PC this wasn't an option.

Fortuitously, a friend of mine had recently mentioned new HomePlug devices capable of carrying ethernet over a house's internal power wiring at up to 200Mbps. After looking around a bit I settled on the Dynalink/NetComm NP200AV from Ascent for $276.20.

The devices come with a Windows configuration tool which relies on .Net Framework 1.1 and Internet Explorer. The configuration tool allows you to change the device passwords (used for the in-built AES encryption) as well as set QoS settings. I wasn't able to get this running under Wine and I don't have a single computer running Windows in the house.

After some searching I came across a company named Devolo who also build HomePlug devices. They made mention on their site of a Linux configuration tool so I downloaded it to give it a go. Following the instructions in the README file I was able to get it compiled and installed on my Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) pre-release desktop machine without any trouble whatsoever. They even specifically mention Debian in the instructions.

It works!

       Searching for devices on local dLAN.......
 
                Remote devices:

        Num.    MAC address             Tx      Rx
        1       00:30:0A:xx:xx:xx       133.88  141.75

UPDATE 20100202:Fixed links and uploaded a copy of the tool just in case.