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What's in a Typical Geek Home Network?
Mike D asks: "I have several machines on my home network (A Mac OS X server, a few Windows XP desktops, a G4 workstation, etc.) as well as various devices (wireless base stations, VPN/firewall) and always have spare machines around that I'm torn on what to do with. So, I wonder -- what do 'typical geeks' have on their home networks? What items do you feel are a requirement, what are luxuries, and what is just cool stuff that I should integrate into my own network? Of course, suggestions should be cheap/free/use existing hardware I can find around the house."
HTPC/DVR ... MythTV
Best thing that we ever did was take one old Pentium box, stuff it full of drives, and set up Second Copy to back up essential files every couple of days.
Turn on the backup box, fire up Second Copy, and an hour later everything critical on our network has been backed up with no work and no thought.
It even syncs directories between the laptop and desktop machines.
Beyond that we have one PIII/Win2K, 1 P4/XP, 1 PII/Win98, 1 linux box, one laptop, one HP5P, one HP 990 inkjet, scanner....
Three Squirrels
The geekier you get, the more varied you'll find the network to be. On the non-geek side, things are probably pretty standard -- at least one computer (probably not more than two or three, however), maybe a cable modem router, printer, etc.
On the extreme geek side, you'll probably find many computers, of various types, running various operating systems. There is no real `typical' -- for the real geeks, every network will be different. If needed, there may be wireless stuff -- either WiFi or something similar, or maybe something done with ham radio or Cybiko terminals, for example. His fridge may be part of the network, allowing him to see how cold his caffinated beverage of choice is. (Though that's not really as cool as one might think, so many geeks skip that sort of show-off thing.)
If there's WiFi, you may find antennas outside, where the neighbor (or fellow geek a mile away with a high gain antenna) has been invited to share in the bounty.
Well, it depends. If you want to be a true geek, you'd already know the answer to that question -- and the answer would depend on you.If you're just a wannabe geek, you'd install a different OS on every one (probably all Windows based (95, 98, XP, 2000, etc.) if that's all you know), hook them all up, leave them powered on all the time (sucking up lots of power for the machines and for cooling if it's hot where you live) and then tell all your friends how cool you are, while you probably never touch them again.
Active machines:
:/ ) The switch is connected to a WRT54G WAP/Router (using stock firmware, I've a second WRT54G that I'm playing with the Sveasoft firmware on). This all connects up to the housemate's Cayman DSL adaptor/router.
1 Linux server/workstation (SMBfs, LAMP, etc...)
1 Win2k workstation
1 WinXPPro PVR (hooked up to a 27" TV, BeyondTV)
1 IBM ThinkPad 600 [XPPro](primary system)
1 Apple iBook 600mhz [OSX 10.3.9](on it's deathbed)
1 Dell Latitude D600 [XPPro, FC3](work laptop)
Dead/Inactive
6 Macs (PM6100, PM9600, 2 G3 servers, two classic 680x0-based systems; all operational)
2 dead laptops
2 dead desktops pending recycling
The desktops are all using Intel eepro1000 GigE workstation NICs connected to a cheap GigE switch (I've maxed it out at 60MB/s thruput
As I walk through the valley of death I fear no one, for I am the meanest sonova bitch in the valley!
Way back when I used to have a number of Cobalt RaQ/Qube servers running (primarily work related), a couple of Linux servers, router, multiple switches, this, that, the other thing.
.. if Linux gamed well I'd switch it back but it doesn't do I haven't) as well as a few concurrent VMWare Linux instances (for work and fun).
I quit. It was pointless.
Now I get by quite happily on:
Linksys WRT54G wired/wireless router (yes, with the hacked firmware and a spare unit for backup)
An old Linux server that I rarely turn on anymore, mostly as an emergency "oops, I need to fdisk this drive" or "I need to offload these ISO images" and then turn it back off.
A dual opteron workstation (Sun W2100z) with enough RAM and disk space to work as my main gaming rig (which means windows
A relatively old linux laptop (P3-600 Thinkpad X20) running my home server. It is robust, does enough web/email/etc serving for 24/7 needs, has a battery for when the main UPS runs out, can go wireless for hacking in the living room, and in a pinch can go with me (but I don't do this much given I have static services on it).
A decent P4-2.4Ghz laptop that I take on the road with me. Gaming in a pinch. 1 drive has Win2K mostly because I didn't want to use WinXP on 512MB of RAM with an MMORPG. The other drive has various Linux partitions for working remotely.
A wireless/wired Squeezebox (networked audio player) in my living room.
Various wireless cards for guests.
Dual CAT-6 lines I ran to the living room during a remodel that are connected to my closet in the back. I don't use them yet, but figured it would help future-proof the house and once used them for hooking up my desktop out in the living room but decided it wasn't worth it.
Soon to be installed is a wired Vonage broadband VOIP adapter (purchased, not used yet, waiting for my number transfer papers to go through), keeping 1 landline for emergencies.
Outside of my house on the roof is a Linksys WET-11 for bridging my wireless internet connection.
And that is after cutting down!
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Home automation for sure. Imagine every light and appliance at your command all the time from anywhere.... Robotic camera's that follow the dog back and forth across the back yard all day long.....and you can watch from work. Super Cool!
Need professional pictures taken in the Puget Sound? Hire me!
I have a 5-year-old laptop (PII/333) hooked up directly to a cable modem. It runs mutt, firefox, and ssh. What more do all you people need in your homes?
So it's because of you slashdot has not evolved from html 3.2...
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
But some of these will make you drool.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Lots of people are listing what's on their network, so I thought I'd tell about how mine is changing, rather than what it looks like.
The biggest change of late has been driven by my decision to move my DVD and DV video onto hard disks. That decision led me to realize that 100Mbps ethernet is Just Too Slow, so I've been upgrading to GigE. That decision has made me realize that GigE can move data from machine to machine faster than the machines get get it to or from disk, which means that there is little practical advantage to local disks anymore.
And it turns out that there are significant advantages to *not* having much local storage. I haven't yet gone all the way to diskless, but I'm thinking about it.
What are the advantages of centralized storage?
My file server has four 200GB IDE drives, two ATA-100 and two ATA-133, each on it's own IDE controller. Each drive is carved into ten 20GB partitions. Then, each partition is joined with the corresponding partitions on the other three drives using Linux software RAID. One of these partition "sets" is mirrored -- RAID-1. On that set, a 20GB volume, I have my digital pictures and some other very important data. In order for that data to get lost, I'd have to lose all four drives. This set also gets backed up onto DVDs which are stored at my mother's house.
Two of the sets are striped -- RAID-0 -- and then combined with LVM. That gives me 160GB of very fast storage. I can get nearly 80MBps of throughput to or from logical volumes in that set. Almost enough to fill a GigE link. I use this for scratch space when editing video and the like.
The other seven partition sets are configured as RAID-5 volumes, then combined with LVM. This gives me 420GB of storage that can survive a single-disk failure and has moderate performance. I put DVD rips here, plus run the system itself out of this volume group.
That's the way it's set up now. The beauty of LVM and the many-small-partitions approach is that if I decide I want it to be different later I can fairly easily move stuff around. For example, if I wanted to add more storage to the mirrored section, taking it from the RAID-5 section, I would:
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You're not a geek until you have at least a few items from this checklist:
FDDI used in home LAN
Cabletron brand network gear
Extreme Networks brand gear
Rackmount Cisco network gear
Utilizing a server that's at least 10 years old
4+ kVA UPS
Who said anything about Bubba in the federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison?
Confront the kid! Confront the kid's parents! Do Something! Whatever you do, don't do nothing at all!
There's more to punishment than prison or filing charges.
Like other cancers of society, the habit of stealing is best broken early on. Otherwise it will spread.
If you're talking about the afterlife or karma... maybe. But...
I bet that probably means a whopper of an even better machine or.. machine(s)... :-)
Apparently you're one of the delusional fools who believe - despite ample evidence to the contrary - that this kind of justice is meted out in this life, and people who've been wronged inevitably get good things from God, and that evil people always end up getting caught. No intelligent person over the age of 12 buys that. I mean really. You aren't that bloody naive... are you?
I'm not teaching anyone anything.
Yeah, that would require you having some wisdom to teach.
Thefts go on all the time. The kid(s) that did this will ultimately get caught and have to do some time. Remember that this kind of thing only escalates. They figure hay I got away with this; how much more can I do and get away with. So; like I said, it will eventually catch up to them.
Oh, so your plan is, rather than helping to prevent him from straying off the path of righteousness, you're going to just let him go and get in way over his head, and then gloat when he fucks over someone else so badly that he finally gets fucked over himself. That is so pathetically irresponsible. Those of us who've been around the block more than a dozen times are morally obligated to provide guidance for those with less experience. Those who turn away without doing that... well, you've heard of the "law of reciprocity"?
I'm not sure if this is just the fact that I'm unlucky or what, but RAID-on-LVM has been less than stable for me.
As Hardwyred said, you're better off reversing that and putting LVM-on-RAID. LVM expects all of its physical volumes to be present and gets very unhappy if one of them is not. Better to use RAID underneath so that what LVM sees is highly reliable volumes that work fine even when a drive kicks offline (which will happen much more often with either LVM or RAID than with just using the raw disk, since when a disk goes down Linux will try to reset it, but RAID and LVM both take that sort of failure to mean that disk is permanently offline until the sysadmin intervenes).
That said, I also thought for a while that my LVM-on-RAID setup was unstable as hell. Every time I got the system fully functional I'd get disk failures and massive file system corruption -- I was blaming reiserfs. Eventually, though, I figured out the real problem.
Power. As in, not enough of it. Apparently, my PSU could just *barely* run all four disks plus the CPU. Occasionally, though, it couldn't keep up. I hadn't worried about power because I'd had the four drives in an older box previously, and they had the same size PSU. I neglected to consider that a 1.3GHz Athlon draws more juice than a 500Mhz K6. Anyway, I finally installed a beefier (and much, much quieter) PSU and things have been running very smoothly ever since.
Not that I think that has anything to do with your situation, but it was an... interesting experience.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Definately the best use for a home network is media distribution.
You can use cheap Cat5 cable with lots of choices in your architecture and cheap switches, as opposed to shielded audio cables and either shielded composite video cables or coax cable, either of which require a star topology for the "network". While in many cases a central media server containing all content makes sense, unlike with traditional "home media networks" (coax RF or baseband distribution), a centralized server is NOT required.
In theory, a home network can be used for home automation, but good home automation systems are still way too expensive. (X10 is way too limited, but it's the only reasonably economical system so far. I recall reading about a new system being released that is supposed to be as cheap as X10 but much more flexible though.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
(including WinXP machine using Bonjour for Windows)
(internal DNS handled by G5)
(external HD, digital camera, digital video, BlueTooth, iSight, label printer, joystick, etc.)
I do not keep any important data on the Windows box, except for backups of the Mac server that perform automatically to SMB partitions via RsyncX every night. Windows is for connecting to the VPN at work, and for my kids to play PC-only games. My family has accounts that authenticate and mount Windows profiles from the G5 Server, which also manages mobile accounts on the two Mac laptops. Everybody's documents are accessible from every computer, and synchronized with the portable home directories on the laptops.
I manage the laptops pretty heavily with OSX Server, and they can only connect to the Internet via a proxy connection to the G5, which is running KidsGoGoGo to filter Internet content for the kids.
When we move into our new house next year, I'll have a real electronics closet behind my office, where much of the networking apparatus will move. At that time I'll probably pick up a used XServe to be the main server for the household.
Other projects for the future include home automation, home theater, and a g5 iMac for the kitchen/family room.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.