How Does Your Personal Data Center Measure Up?

tachijuan asks: "My job allows me too meet many technically inclined people. Invariably we get to talking about our home setups. I've run across some very sophisticated setups. Some people I've met have enough computing and storage resources to have themselves classified as large data centers. They run this at home, and usually just for the hell of it. How do the setups of Slashdot readers measure up?" How many pieces of networked digital equipment do you have at home? "Here's a description of mine:

1. 1 x RedHat 9 quad processor PIII Xeon web server+other general duties stuff
2. 1 x FC3 router/VPN server
3. 1 x Astaro secure unix firewall/external router
4. 1 x FC3 email ( http://zimbra.com/ ) server + backup server
5. 1 x Mac G3 OSX 10.3.9 print server
6. 1 x WinXP print server/general use machine
7. 1 x WinXP general purpose home machine + TIVO media center server
8. 1 x UltraSparc 10, Solaris 9, play machine + web server
9. 2 x WinXP laptops
10. 1 x Apple PowerBook 17"
11. 1 x NetApp 630 with 1.1TB of disk serving both NFS and CIFS
12. 2 x external USB 200GB drives for backups of main data in NetApp DCF
13. 3 x inkjet printers scattered around the house
14. 1 x 8 port GigE main DCF backbone switch
15. 1 x 32 port Etherport III main home network switch
16. 1 x WRT54G switch providing high speed network for interal home use
17. 1 x befw11s4 switch + range extender for slow-speed, high range, general home use
18. 1 x TIVO!
19. 4 x spare machines laying around waiting to be purposed

By the standards of some of the people I've run accross, this is not much. To my non-techie friends, this seems either extravagant, puzzling, or both."

Comments

Just a Fujitsu P1510...

[GrpA]

I don't have to compensate for shortcomings in other areas...

Re:Just a Fujitsu P1510...

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of an old joke:

A tiger is walking through the jungle, and off in the distance he hears a cry for help. He runs over to find his friend the elephant stuck in the quicksand. "Help me! help me!", cries the elephant. So the tiger runs home, gets his Corvette, drives back to the elephant, throws him a rope, and pulls him out of the quicksand. "Thank you" says the elephant.

Two weeks later, the elephant is walking through the jungle and hears a cry for help in the distance. Running over, he sees his friend the tiger stuck in the quicksand. "Help me! Help me!", cries the tiger. The elephant whips out his dick, throws it to the tiger, and uses it to pull him to safety.

The moral of the story? If you have a big dick, you don't need a Corvette.

Re:Just a Fujitsu P1510...

[palndrumm]

I heard it as a horse and a chicken on a farm, getting stuck in a big puddle of mud, with the punchline "if you're hung like a horse, you don't need a [fancy car name] to pick up chicks".

Re:Just a Fujitsu P1510...

[Sentry21]

People always love my powerbook when they first see it, but they invariably say something along the lines of 'It's so small!' Of course my reply is always, 'Yeah, I'm overcompensating for having a huge dick.'

No dates so far, but it gets a lot of laughs. :p

Re:Just a Fujitsu P1510...

[xmas2003]

Hilarious - no mod points, otherwise I'd toss 'em your way. Yea, better headline would have been "How Do You Measure Up?" since this is /. and everyone would have known you were talking about your personal data center ...

Re:Just a Fujitsu P1510...

[corvair2k1]

I've considered building a cluster with a dozen nodes or so... I don't really know why I want this, because I have access to very powerful machines at work, but it seems like a neat idea.

After thinking about this discussion of "compensation", maybe I don't want twelve full cases sitting in my living room. People might start thinking things about... *ahem*

Re:Just a Fujitsu P1510...

[middlemen]

Actually I always thought that elephants had small dicks and hence could not blow themselves using their trunks.

Not extravagant

[Red Cape]

It's a hobby. Many people have hobbies.. like gnomes. It's normal.

Re:Not extravagant

[Sloppy]

Many people have hobbies.. like gnomes.

What kind of hobbies do gnomes have?

Re:Not extravagant

[Eideewt]

Oh, you know: standing in gardens and making data centers.

Re:Not extravagant

[d99-sbr]

Well hobbies I don't know about, but we all know of their business plans.

Power consumption?

[Willie_the_Wimp]

I started building a nice phat data/media center, plus PCs attached to the TV in living room, bedroom, etc... but my power bill is already crazy. If I start adding more and more 100% uptime systems, it will get ridiculous. I have pared down to just the essentials; what's the point of all that hardware in a house? "Just cause I can" doesn't pay the bills.

Granted, I live in CA, so my power bill is pretty obscene to begin with, so maybe this isn't a concern for everyone.

Fred.

Re:Power consumption?

[dgatwood]

Agreed. I reduced my hardware quite a bit and reduced my power consumption over the last year when my power bill started exceeding $100/month during the winter (with gas heat).

That said, even in the reduced capacity, I'm running a Linux firewall, with a Mac OS X server and an MkLinux server in the DMZ, with a networked TiVo and an Airport Extreme base station on my internal network, and non-concinuously, I use two laptops on the wireless network, a quad G5 on the internal wired network, and a photo printer on the internal wired network (which also has built-in wireless, but since my wired and wireless are bridged, I saw no reason to bother setting that part up). I also have live 10/100 network ports in just about every room in my house.

The best part of my network, though, is that I had to move the location of the firewall because the box wouldn't physically fit in the cabinet where my previous firewall lived. (I'd still be using it, but it had some hardware problems, and being an old Quadra, buying a SCSI drive for it would have been kind of pricey. It also had a hard time handling the PPPoE. at a reasonable speed.) The problem is that I wired things up so that the entire house hung off the back side of the DSL modem with no splits for maximum signal. (~12,000 feet and getting 1500/384 solidly.) Thus, without destroying that, I couldn't move the DSL modem. So it currently lives in one room and my firewall lives in my server closet about 30 feet away, with a permanent ethernet line between them. The firewall then sends the DMZ back to the original firewall location to distribute with a network switch, which then has two connections back to the server closet for the two servers. The switch also puts the Airport Extreme on the DMZ, which then, in turn, provides firewall services for the internal network.

The only thing I regret is that there isn't currently a way to ssh into my internal network, mainly because I was one permanent ethernet line short. Yes, I know I could put a separate switch in the server closet for that part of the DMZ , but then I couldn't brag about what a spaghetti mess my network has become..... :-)

By the way, can anyone recommend any good single-board computers---maybe in a Mini-ITX form factor or so---with four gigabit NICs that are available in the U.S.? Alternately, maybe a quad-NIC PCI card with a mini-ITX motherboard?

Re:Power consumption?

[Rick Zeman]

Wow, blast from the past seeing "MKLinux" and then looking to see the username attached to it. Sends me back 9 years or so....Glad to see you haven't given up the cause. I think last I saw you were working on a floppy driver for it maybe?

Anyway, my geekfest is a PowerEdge running Mandrake 9.2* for postfix/mailman/apache for mailman; a newer PowerEdge running Netware 6.5/GroupWise 7.0 , and a poweredge running Server 2k3...which does absolutely nothing except burn electricity, all running on a gigabit Netgear. The postfix accepts mail for my domain which sits on my SpeakEasy DSL.
2 personal powerbooks (mine and the wife's), she has a work PowerBook, and I have a personal Dell dual booting XP/SuSE 10, and my workhorse Mac dual 867 G4.

*woefully out of date, I know.

Re:Power consumption?

[TClevenger]

Agreed. My 24/7 server is a Toshiba Tecra 8100 laptop (PIII/650, 512MB, 30GB, Combo) with a broken screen I got for a song on eBay. 13 watts standby and a built-in 3-hour UPS. I have a much larger server that stays switched off (though I'm considering setting it up for Wake-on-LAN so I can activate it remotely when needed.)

Re:Power consumption?

[j-cloth]

I don't have a setup near the OP, but it's possible to make something useable for home with no need for a backyard reactor.

I've got two laptops -- one Athlon 64 3200 running XP and one Toshiba P90 ;). The P90 is a debian console for a hacked NSLU2 ebmedded linux device that shares .5TB of files (NFS/smb), web, SQL, mail, VPN and continuous bittorrent. It's tied to 3Mbit DSL through a d-link wireless router (that need to be replaced -- it sucks). Before the NSLU2, I had an old K6-2 toaster in the same role. This thing performs better, runs silent and uses no power. There's no way the site I host would survive if I put the link up here (even assuming the pipe could handle it), but it'll deal with more than what most home users need.

As for power, the main laptop uses 90W at full load and the rest sit on a 400VA UPS that can run it all for at least a couple hours (power's never been out longer than that). Completely satisfactory for home use and negligible power consumption compared to my dishwasher.

Re:Power consumption?

[Pfhor]

Man, that NSLU2 is freaking sweet looking. I'll have to look into that when building my next network setup.

Re:Power consumption?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

And remember, it's not just the power tu run the systems, but the power to cool them as well.

Unless you live in Alaska, just open the windows, and wear a parka in the server room.

Re:Power consumption?

[j-cloth]

It's very cool and cheap too. I'd recommend it to anyone. Just don't expect spectacular data throughput -- its USB is sloooooooow. I can watch movies off it, but I doubt three people could watch different movies at the same time.

Next submission

[Mortiss]

I am sorry but this sort of subject just begs for another "ask slashdot" submission called: "What is your monthly electricity bill?" Now seriously, how much would setups like that add to your average power bills.

Re:Next submission

[Anonymous Coward]

But at least I bet he pulls in babes with that kinda setup at home. ;) Seriously, I get a lot less strange looks from women coming over to my place since I reduced my stock of machines from 9 to 3.

Re:Next submission

[TruthSeeker]

Dunno about his, but mine does a "nice" 150euros/month. Probably a bit more if you count the air conditionner that goes with it.

Re:Next submission

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Yeah, a real "pussy server"

Re:Next submission

[__aaclcg7560]

According to my electric bills, I'm using 9KWh per day. That seems to be the U.S. average. I have five machines but only two that run continuously, the various assortments of wall warts and a 25-gallon fish tank (home of a 3-inch firemouth, 3-inch pictus catfish and six tiger barbs). As I rebuild my machines, I'm keeping an eye on reducing the energy consumption as much possible. Even though I'm an uber-geek, I find reading the electric bill to be very confusing.

Re:Next submission

[jm92956n]

According to the page you linked, the average cost per KWh is approximately 9 cents (and I, as a lucky New Yorker, pay almost 24 cents). The average consumption is much higher. According to this page, the average usage per year is 10,215 KWh per year, or roughly 28 per day .. thus, if you're using only 9 per day, you're significantly below the national average. According to my electric bill, I use 3 KWh per day.

Re:Next submission

[hshana]

Ha! I know it's late because I just read the parent to say,"How much is your mother's electric bill?"

Re:Next submission

[ScuzzMonkey]

Wow, you had me scared, I'm at about double that... but looking at that chart more closely, I think that's cents per kilowatt hour--they're giving cost per region, rather than usage per region.

I'd be curious to see what that figure is, too, though.

Re:Next submission

[__aaclcg7560]

I misread the chart. My cost per KWh is like $0.11 USD typically since I'm in California.

Re:Next submission

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that strange? I think almost all of us have to pay our mothers for at least part of the electric bill. If my mom asks me to start paying rent, that is where I draw the line.

Re:Next submission

[StarHeart]

My power bill a few months ago was around $175. Then I tweaked my computers for low consumpution and the next month it was $155. The problem was not the computers, but the electric heater. It wouldn't turn off, so was at least partially running all the time. I got it fixed and this month my power bill was around $105. During none winter months it has been $60-100 in the past.

Re:Next submission

[spacecowboy420]

Jesus - last month I was 62kw. machineCnt == 5. I must really be doing something wrong.

Re:Next submission

[Jorkapp]

The problem was not the computers, but the electric heater. It wouldn't turn off, so was at least partially running all the time

That's what you get for putting your P4 Prescott's into Stand-By mode.

Re:Next submission

[chthon]

I have an AMD Athlon P2400 rig with 2 Gb ram, 1 40 Gb drive and 3 120 Gb drives in RAID5.

In between 2004 and 2005 the thing had been continuously running about 250 days, and it added at the end of the year about 400 EUR extra to my electricity bill.

Currently, I now start it and stop it when I want to use it.

I need time to figure out if I can use some advanced power management on that system or if I need to move to a more recent motherboard with power saving features.

Re:Next submission

[warpSpeed]

My power bill a few months ago was around $175

My power bill is about $500-$700/mo depending on the season. I run about 35 PCs, multiple Routers, and several switches in my basement. This is for my business, so most of the power usage is a write off. I have two 1 ton portable A/C units that pump the waste heat in to the house in the winter. When it is 35 F or above outside there are no heaters running in the house. At 50-55 we have to start craking the windows to let the heat out.

not that I am over compensating or anything....

Re:Next submission

[Pusene]

aaarrrrrrrrrr

Comparisons

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, another Slashdot penis size competition. Why not just ask "So, how big is your ... disk" with a leering grin and be done with it.

Back of hand?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the back of my hand... holds all the data I need. When it's legible

Re:Back of hand?

[GeekyMike]

and the other side of the hand, when surfing for Pr0n is needed. :o)

Little Datacenter here

[Pop69]

I've only got a Sun Netra X1 running Sparc Gentoo, a Netgear FSM726S switch, a Win2k domain controller, a dual boot XP/Gentoo 3500 Athlon 64 , a 1 gig Celeron with Win98SE running off a 2Mb ADSL connection on a Netgear DG834GT. There's a couple of laptops that connect to the wi-fi point on the router but that's pretty much it.

I did have a dual Pentium Pro 200 machine as well but it caught fire for some reason and I had to junk it......

My Setup

[Anonymous Coward]

check it: http://travis.travisbsd.org/pfiles/area/

Re:my setup

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine a beowulf cluster of all his computers... oh wait.

Re:My Setup

[HTL2001]

haha... in the last pic one of the comps has "never obsolete" on a sticker on the case...

Let's hear it for DEC

[thomasdz]

OK...I probably have one of the more antique home data centers...

three VAX 4000-300 (all running OpenBSD, of course, it's my home firewall)
two VAX 4000-200
two VAX 4000-105 (running VMS)
a VAX 4000 m60
two VAX 3100
three PDP 11/34as
I've also got two DEC Rainbows, but I haven't powered them up in years.
And of course, the usual collection of Commodore 64s, Radio Shack CoCos, Radio Shack MC-10s, etc. etc.

And a Mac Mini in the kitchen

Thomas

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[LodCrappo]

that lab sounds freaking great. any pictures online? i would love to have a vax or two and a pdp 11 on hand.

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[MindStalker]

I'd hate to see your power bill..

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[thomasdz]

I'm in Canada...it's just like having electric heating....a little bit more expensive than natural gas
seven cents a KiloWatt Hour

So, whether the money goes to the (natural gas) furnace or the VAXen, it is basically the same.

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[rcpitt]

With all that power I hope you at least use the waste heat to heat the hot-tub ;)

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[Anonymous Coward]

three VAX 4000-300 (all running OpenBSD, of course, it's my home firewall)

Good Jesus, that must be one hell of a firewall. I just have a single little linksys thingy.

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[MindStalker]

Lucky, I live in Florida so the bills go to cooling, though Winter heating is expensive cause gas isn't an option everyone.

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[Karma Farmer]

three VAX 4000-300 (all running OpenBSD, of course, it's my home firewall)

What, if your house starts on fire you jump behind them and wait for the firetrucks?

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[Anonymous Coward]

All the windoze kids on /. need to get busy sucking your dick right now.

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[TheGratefulNet]

I have a DECstation 25 (ultrix 4.2a) if you want it. it worked the last time I tried it.. /worked for DEC for 6 yrs, back at the Mill in barnyard, mass ;)

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[forkazoo]

W00t!! I, too, have a VAX in my collection. Almost nobody knows what it is anymore. A shame.

Anyhow...

One VAX Server 4000
One AlphaServer
One SGI Octane, One SGI Indy. (MIPS)
A bunch of SPARC and UltraSPARC boxes. Ultra1's, SS IPX, SS10, SS20...
iBook G4, PowerMac G3 (PPC)
Macintosh (The original 1984) (M68K)
HP D-Class 9000 (HPPA)
One AMD64 box, and a few IA32 boxes (including Xbox)

I'm sure I have a few other imortant CPU architectures in systems I'm forgetting. That's 10, so I feel I have a decent coverage. :)

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[Anonymous Coward]

With all those VAX's you could compete with Ticketmaster! Yep they use VAX's to handle ticket sales (or more commonly VAX emulators running on PC hardware these days).

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[Kadin2048]

Perhaps if you have a digital camera and a spare few minutes sometime, you'd be willing to take a photo of that..? The photo they're using on the Wikipedia page for DECstation right now is really crummy.

I'd take one, but sadly, I don't own a DEC myself. Always had a soft spot for them, though. Someday...

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[thomasdz]

What, if your house starts on fire you jump behind them and wait for the firetrucks?

Why was this modded funny? That's EXACTLY what I will do... :-)

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[j-cloth]

[snip geekfest]
And a Mac Mini in the kitchen

Hilarious.

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[ckaminski]

Compaq, uh, I mean HPaq will kill the Alpha for sure this year... right? Still on track for that, right?

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[Kadin2048]

Whenever they get around to it, I'll buy one and sit it next to my Apple IIgs and my Dual G5* -- I'll have a nice little collection of "last of" computers.

Actually there's something to be said for owning computers that were the last of their kinds, since they tend to be arguably the best in whatever category they're the last of (this is assuming the manufacturer continually improves their equipment). Within that very small section of the universe, you'll always have the best!

Humm, I wonder when Sun is going to kill the SPARC...

(* Okay, so I know that the Dual G5 wasn't really the top of the line of the G5s, the Quad was, but I couldn't afford it.)

Re:Let's hear it for DEC

[TheGratefulNet]

yeah, I could photo mine.

its a 'personal' DECstation 25 (double digits, not triple). I think that pictured 120 was a dog, anyway; the DS200's were the ones to have (when I was using them).

ok, I'll shoot some and submit them. never did that for wiki before - should be interesting..

I actually do quite a bit of photography (http://www.flickr.com/photos/linux-works/sets/) so it won't be a problem to get a decent shot of the system. maybe I'll even do the insides, as well.

thanks for the nudge.

my setup

[schnits0r]

3 Ghz machine (winXP/mandriva), 3 P 800Mhz (2 Ubuntu, 1 WinXP), 1.8 Ghz laptop (it's my portable lifeline, winxp/ubuntu), 2 300mhz (ubuntu) 1 200 mhz (ubuntu), 1 133 Mhz (ubuntu), you don't need a lot of power if all you want the machine for is disk space. I also have a portable harddrive enclosure, and wifi around the house so I can work anywhere on this setup in my home.

I used to do this...

[jonoid]

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to acquire some older hardware just to play around with. IIRC, I had a PowerMac 6100 web server, G3 desktop for most general work, iBook for portability, P2-450 with Debian for ftp, P100 with OpenBSD as a SSH server, Mac Centris 660av as a webcam capture (uploaded to 6100), and an old PowerMac 8100 to play old games on. At the time I was in high school and all of these machines were contained in my bedroom. At night the loud whir of fans put me to sleep and all of those power LEDs lit the room.

Now, I simply have my iBook as my main machine and an Athlon PC (downstairs) to store files and backup my iBook. I guess the novelty of running a small server farm wore off. I also loathe fan noise, which is why the Athlon is not in my room any more.

Uh, 1 P166MMX.

[WoTG]

Really, how much gear does one need running at home? More importantly, how much power and space are you willing to use to do it? I've got an ancient P166MMX running downstairs for file/print/mail/and even web hosting for my personal website (not the one in the sig). About a year ago, it was a sad old P90 that finally had a seizure of some sort. The only thing I would consider changing right now is a bit more hard drive space... and maybe RAID. (Yes, I do regular backups).

Oh, that excludes workstations, routers, and hubs of course. Two desktops and a laptop - none of them is particularly high-end either.

holy overkill, batman!

[Clover_Kicker]

> quad processor PIII Xeon web server+other general duties stuff

My file/mail/web/backup server is a Pentium 233 MMX. It's ridiculously overpowered for what it does.

load averages: 0.10, 0.09, 0.08

Re:holy overkill, batman!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's WAY beyond overkill. I did some consolidation a while ago too because of that. The same box has shares (about 10 metric fucktons of storage - some for AV), does backups, has the web server (IIs6 and Apache), print queue for the LasetJet, etc. I ended up also moving SQL Server to it too, as well as source control (perforce, SVN, CVS), as the load was basically 0% all the time as well. At some point it was even used as firewall/NAT (recently moved to Smoothwall on my Asterix box which is also my main Linux workstation). The load on it most of the time is still around 0% (just some old athlon xp box).

Running mail at home is a waste of my time. It can be done, but you get nothing but hassle out of it (my ISP isn't stable enough, I'd need a mail fwd'ing service, etc)

Having tons of way overpowered PCs for every little task is stupid, and it wastes power, space, makes noise, etc.

Some of them do things you can't exactly consolidate though... The HTPC (HDTV, DVB, plays from AV share too) can't really be combined with anything (needs CPU power). My P-M laptop stays in the kitchen most of the time (recipes, play music, surf web, etc; small & efficient) although it sometimes makes it to the living room - wifi helps (can't consolidate without losing portability). The kids got their gaming/homework PC (can't really consolidate that either). And then there's my main development PC which has a ton of RAM, and is also used for virtual machines (servers) to reduce the amount of PCs required to do testing of software and of deployments, having DB2/Oracle servers (big heavy stuff you don't want to run in background 24/7 if not needed), etc (easily replaces a couple dozen extra PCs that would sit idle most of the time). It's also my photo (stitch panos, etc)/AV editing PC and much more.

Having 1 PC for each little thing (one for apache, one for whatever database you use, one for mail, one for firewall, one for voip, one for shares, one for print server, one for backups, one for SCM, etc) is just fucking retarded. If I did that I'd end up with 4 dozen PCs that sit around and do nothing but waste electricity year-round and uses lots of space. And it's too much of a PITA to maintain all of them, and it's a lot more hardware that can break and to upgrade (costs WAY more).

Re:holy overkill, batman!

[Anonymous Coward]

My file/mail/web/backup server is a Pentium 233 MMX. It's ridiculously overpowered for what it does.

You forgot to post its URL so Slashdot can give your statement a test.

Re:holy overkill, batman!

[Clover_Kicker]

> Running mail at home is a waste of my time. It can be done, but
> you get nothing but hassle out of it

By mail I mean an IMAP server, so my 2 desktop boxes can get mail at any time, whatever OS they're booting.

> Some of them do things you can't exactly consolidate though...

100% agree, but file/print/web/backup require very little horsepower.

Re:holy overkill, batman!

[Clover_Kicker]

My puny DSL bandwidth will more than protect my puny web server.

233MHz is a lot of horsepower if you're not running a GUI. Back in the day, ftp.cdrom.com pushed 800GB/day with a single Pentium Pro 200.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/08/cdrom.id g/

Re:holy overkill, batman!

[Just Some Guy]

My file/mail/web/backup server is a Pentium 233 MMX. It's ridiculously overpowered for what it does.

I was there for a long time, too, until I started asking more of it:

• ClamAV scanning all incoming mails (even if I can't "get" Windows viruses, I don't want my inbox clogged with 'em).
• SpamAssassin to drop the blatant junk.
• Web pages that required more than minimal processing.

at which point the little MMX 233 turned into an Athlon 1.4.

Re:holy overkill, batman!

[dow]

Just upgraded my 128mb ram k6 200mhz NetBD box to a quad 400mhz xeon w 2.6gig ram and now my websites are *noticeably* faster. I think its because now I'm running it on Linux .

Re:holy overkill, batman!

[Anonymous Coward]

My file/mail/web/backup server is a Pentium 233 MMX. It's ridiculously overpowered for what it does.

Post the URL and we'll see.

Re:holy overkill, batman!

[Clover_Kicker]

> Post the URL and we'll see.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178030&cid=147 66857

But it can be important.

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who headed my last IT department asked 1 and only 1 question in his interviews "please describe your home network".

His logic was that if someone didn't have a home network ("my windoze box is connected to the thingy PacBell gave me") couldn't answer questions about security, etc on his home network, he didn't have the interest level to be well suited in his department.

Re:But it can be important.

[jbaltz]

In fact, when I was doing interviewing, if I thought the candidate kinda sorta had merit, I'd ask, "what do you run at home?"

Some folks said "I run one thing -- a laptop -- and I use it only to check my hotmail."

Some folks said "I've got 4 machines running ..." Mostly it was linux but I had one guy -- an über-windows guy -- who had Windows AD running, with redundant controllers, the whole nine yards...neat stuff.

And some folks said "I can only afford one machine; I just got out of school/have a huge debt load, but every week I install something new on it."

The first group of folks got the "hmm...well, OK, we'll get back to you."

The latter two got props.

Re:But it can be important.

[Darth_brooks]

Well technically I have 0 geek cred. I have a sony laptop and an AOL dial-up connection (for another couple weeks until the 90-day trial runs out.) DSL is not available in my area (two blocks south of me it is. fucking SBC/AT&T/Ma Bell) and I can't justify 50 bucks a month for cable at the moment.

But...

That AOL dial-up allows me to manage a couple active directory domain controllers, a couple linux servers, A BSD box, and a quad processor PPro200 File Server. All told about half a terrabyte in storage.

My network / datacenter may suck but the network I built and manage with it is nice.

(the nice things about AOL: it's never busy, and I've got access numbers everywhere I go. Too bad they're going to start asking me to pay for it soon.)

Re:But it can be important.

[dwbassett42]

Just call and tell them you want to cancel your service. They'll give you another free month or so without asking any questions. I myself did this long enough to use AOL for a full 6 months without ever paying for it, and have heard of people stringing them on for much longer. When you finally have to ditch them, just say that you're moving to an apartment that has ethernet pre-installed. In my case, it was the truth.

Re:But it can be important.

[PPGMD]

...but I had one guy -- an über-windows guy -- who had Windows AD running, with redundant controllers, the whole nine yards...neat stuff.

I don't remember ever applying for a job in New York.

Re:But it can be important.

[Tim C]

So basically, you shitcan the ones who like to leave their work at work and have outside interests.

Re:But it can be important.

[sirket]

I got asked this question in an interview one time- pointed the guy to my web site which has pictures of the network and got the job on the spot :)

At the time the datacenter in the basement alone had:

1. 4 x P2 400- 512MB RAM- SCSI Disks running FreeBSD
   
2. 1 x SS10- 384 MB RAM- Quad Fast Ethernet- Dual SM81 Processors (80MHz, 1 meg cache)- Dual NVSIMMS (Non-volatile write cachine SIMMS running Solaris
   
3. 1 x SS10- 512 MB RAM- Quad Fast Ethernet- Single SM81 running Solaris.
   
4. Cisco 2503 Router
   
5. 3 x DEC AlphaSation 4-233's with 256 MB RAM running FreeBSD.
   
6. 3 x IBM Dual proc PPRO 200's with 256 MB RAM running FreeBSD.
   
7. 2 smaller systems that I don't even rmemeber what they are or run.
   
8. Ethernet Hub for traffic dumps.
   
9. Intel 24 port 10/100 managed Ethernet Switch.
   
10. Dual KVM's
    
11. 16 Port unmanaged 10/100 switch for internal network
    
12. 2 x APC SmartUPS 1400RM.
    

In addition to the racks in the basement there were:

1. HP LJ 4050DN with duplexer
   
2. DJ 870 Color inkjet with print server
   
3. Various other computers in the house including laptops, etc.
   
4. Wireless routers and access points
   
5. Various hardare based firewalls
   
6. Etc.
   

I've added plenty of other fun and interesting systems including a Cisco 2611 and other fun equipment but I haven't gotten pictures of any of it recently. Most of this has since been replaced with Mini-itx systems because my power bill had climbed over $300 per month.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29067610@N00/

-sirket

Re:But it can be important.

[Just Some Guy]

So basically, you shitcan the ones who like to leave their work at work and have outside interests.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable IT decision. Every good geek I've ever known does it because that's what they love to do - the fact that someone will pay them for it is just icing on the cake. Someone who's not interested enough to play with geek stuff at home won't be good at IT.

Yes, that was a generalization. Yes, I stand by it.

Re:But it can be important.

[no_pets]

I agree, that would be a very important question to ask. I actually worked in an IT department where a few of the employees didn't even have a PC. The help desk guy had an old 386 with Windows 3.11 on it and this was around 2000.

I couldn't hardly believe it since (and I will show my age) when I originally applied to work for this employer in 1995 as a part-time, night, weekend computer operator they did ask me several questions, but I specifically remember two of the questions that I was asked. One was what kind of PC that I had. I would say that this is the precursor to the "home network" question since not as many people had networks at home in '95. I described to them my old 486 that I had bought bare-bones and added HDD, CD-ROM, sound card, RAM, etc to over the years. I also explained that I was saving up for a new Pentium as well.

The other question I was asked was if I had heard any good jokes lately. Then they wanted to hear it. That was a good indication that the department had a good sense of humor and that I would fit in.

BTW if somoene works in an IT department and does not own a PC then they should not be working there. Oh, and using your kid's PC to check your mail does not count.

Re:But it can be important.

[jbaltz]

Well -- yes.
I disregarded the people who don't have enough interest in what they do to want to push themselves and teach themselves more about it.

If all you want is 9 to 5, the civil service beckons for you!

(By the way -- I have 3 kids, hobbies, and community service as well, and yet I manage the time for self-training in there.)

Re:But it can be important.

[jbaltz]

...then it definitely wasn't you! I know, because the guy I interviewed wasn't stupid enough to post something like this to /.

Re:But it can be important.

[lightning01]

What a bunch of bull. By your reasoning all the guys who work on mainframes or large systems during the day couldn't be considered good IT folks 'cause they don't have one to play with at home. I can tell your hiring experience encompasses a wide range of infrastructure support people. (It's a generalization, but I stand by it.) Shoot, the best guys I've seen hired didn't obsess over the same crap at home as they had at work, they had other interests. Doesn't mean they weren't expert in their field. It actually made them better at IT at as they weren't 2 dimensional morons.

Re:But it can be important.

[SacredNaCl]

I got asked this question in an interview one time- pointed the guy to my web site which has pictures of the network and got the job on the spot :) Sirket, what helped you the most, was having everything organized into a pair of racks, neatly, and with a minimum of space wasted. That is what I like to see when looking for someone for any IT based project. If they have their machines scattered all over the house, and it looks like a junk pile -- it says quite a bit about how they value organization & planning, and not very good things at that.

Re:But it can be important.

[engagebot]

But seriously, what would be an acceptable answer?

Oh I've got a Linksys 4-port + wireless router, oh don't worry, its locked down tight. WEP key *AND* MAC filtering enabled. Windows XP SP2 firewall? Oh yeah, its enabled. I feel sorry for those poor bastards who try to wardrive on MY cable modem...

I don't know anybody who's going to be running blade switches at home or configuring VLANs. Although you may filter out the 'i have no idea, the guy at best buy told me i needed it' people, its not much of a gauge for 'real' it people. What you do it home may not be a really good indicator of how network-inclined somebody may be.

Re:But it can be important.

[sirket]

You're absolutely right. I've had numerous people comment that my basement is cleaner than their datacenter. For me it is a simple case of "I can't fix what I can't find." I've been to far too many datacenters in which the cables run all over the place, are in complete tangles, and would be impossible to troubleshoot.

On the front of a rack I always use a cable just long enough to reach with a minimum of play. Tracing a wire is greatly simplified because you can just follow it instead of trying to keep track of it inside some bundle. On the back side of a rack I always number both ends of the cable so that I can find a cable on one side, grab it's number and find it on the other side. Although that should be standard practice often times it is not.

-sirket

Re:But it can be important.

[tbuskey]

I've been on both sides of the question.

When I hire a sysadmin, I want someone who is inquisitive and interested in the job. Someone who doesn't play with computers at home in this day and age, isn't interested. I want someone who thinks about things after work. Who plays with these issues at home, even if it's just in his mind.

Given the prices of computers (and used ones and free ones), cost isn't a factor. Given that, if you don't have a computer at home, you're not interested.

They guys that says "I have a PC the kids play with" is probably just going to do what the manuals and training say. He's not going to write shell scripts or look for free software to solve problems. When things don't work the way the manual says they will, he won't be able to fix them.

Who do you want working on your car? The guy with his own shop (and the factory training) who races cars on the weekend or the guy at the dealer with the factory training? The racer will probably know a bunch of tricks that let him work faster, find issues faster, etc that will cost you less $$$.

If you're a General Contractor, hiring carpenters, you want the guy that built his own house/barn/garage/shed. You're not going to hire the guy that doesn't have a hammer & saw at home.

Re:But it can be important.

[Glonoinha]

I'm offended, only because I do have one at home - a Cray XMP class.
Well parts of one anyways.

That said, my ops center at home consists of an array of four PowerEdge 400sc machines on a GigE backbone, roughly four 2.8GHz HyperThreaded P4s, 6G RAM and 1.3T of drive space spread between them. Throw in an older PowerEdge 500sc and two laptops (one hard wired to the net, one wireless) and that's a pretty good idea of what I have under the hood.

I run WinXP on all the current hardware, Win2000 on the older machines, and SuSE Linux 10 in a VMware session on one of the machines that gets left on all the time. Ironically, I spend most of my time in the Linux VM, at least when I'm talking to the outside world. And yes, I have clustered them (Beowulf nodes running on Linux VMs on the four faster machines, runs the Skyvase rendering in under three seconds.)

And when the best tech guys I know talk about their home 'system' we both know they aren't talking about a single computer either.

Re:But it can be important.

[tbuskey]

I grew up near a number of ski areas. When I bought skis at the shop, I'd ask the sales guy what he used. Because he was a ski salesman so he could get cheap/free tickets and discounts on equipment.

When I went to buy a motorcycle I asked the sales guy what he rode. One guy said he didn't have a motocycle license. I took my business elsewhere. I'd do the same at a car dealer. Or car stereo dealer (he better be ableto tell me about his car's stereo).

Sure, you can sell skis, motorcycles, cars, etc even if you don't use them. But how much can you know about them and why *this* one is better then that one?

Re:But it can be important.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's illegal.

I'm just starting.

[SocialEngineer]

I just got my first job out of college (working for the oldest newspaper in Missouri as a graphic artist), so after a raise or two, I should be able to afford more than ramen noodles and college loan payments :) So far I've got an old Thinkpad serving as an SSH/Proxy server (Slack 10.2 - I use it to set up an encrypted connection while on wireless hotspots - see my guide at Security Engine for secure surfing using SSH), a couple routers, a multiboot desktop (Win XP/Slackware 10.2, later changing the Slack install to OpenBSD), and a "newer" (still old - 1ghz p3) Thinkpad laptop running Windows 2000 and Slackware 10.2, which goes with me whenever I'm doing work outside the house.

I've noticed Dell servers getting cheaper - first plan is to pick up one or two of them, since they offer Linux compatible hardware configs.

My tech fetish is storage. I had a terrabyte of storage until one of my drives went kaput, so now I'm back down to 780gb IIRC. I'm a solo recording artist/sound engineer, so I have a lot of raw audio files. I plan to build that up to a few TB, now that drives keep getting cheaper. Once I get a couple decent servers, I'm going to start generating my own rainbow tables.

And Americans wonder why the world hates us...

[Anonymous Coward]

Run 30 machines at home to do our bidding when (and this is still overkill) a few could do the same amount of work. Who cares if you are only home (and awake) for a few hours a day. Remember these days fondly when energy prices are sky high.

1xWRT54gs with OpenWRT (wireless/firewall/router/vpn endpoint/whatever else)
1x1.7TB RAID server whose disks spin down entirely when not in use (largest power draw)
1xThinkpad X40 (laptops don't draw much)
1xMac Mini (everything else, and the mini also draws almost nothing)

Re:And Americans wonder why the world hates us...

[TruthSeeker]

Bleh, no need to be American to do this ^^

Re:And Americans wonder why the world hates us...

[gid]

I have a pretty simple setup as well; basically just have two machines.

One linux box (Athlon XP 2600+) running the world: router(using QoS), firewall, fileserver, email, imapd, web server, database, dns, dhcp, teamspeak, web cam, bittorrent tracker, game server du jour, and usually runs a full gnome desktop basically just doing web browsing, email, irc and whatever. This is the only machine that stays on all the time. It's a little bit overkill, but it's nice having a snappy web browsing machine that's always on.

Then I have another machine (Athlon 64) running Windows XP that I use for work, and play games on.

A netgear switch connecting everything.

And a cable modem for that internet thing.

Plus the wife has her desktop and her work laptop. And sometimes another random machine or two I may be working on for someone else, playing with trying out a new linux dist, or whatever.

All wired of course--nothing beats a good old fashioned wire. We also have wireless--sort of... well at least our kind neighbors do. :)

Size

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine's 12 inches long by 2 inches thick...wait, what are we comparing here?

geek's overcompensating for something?

[the_humeister]

I don't understand why someone would need this much computer equipment. It's like the guy with the Armani suit and Rolex watch driving a Lamborghini - he's compensating for something. Well, at least the Lamborghini guy probably gets some play... But then again, my own philosophy on life is to live within my means with as few material possessions as i can possibly get away with because inevitably i'll be moving, and i hate moving things.

Anyways, here's the networked equipment I have in my 380 square feet of apartment space:
1) Sempron 64 running Debian 3.1
2) Power Macintosh G3 (Blue and White) running Mac OS X 10.4.5
3) CompUSA router
4) DSL modem

Re:geek's overcompensating for something?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy with the Lambo pays someone else to pack his boxes and move his belongings.

The guy with 20 computers may be able to get his dad to help him move out of the basement.

Re:geek's overcompensating for something?

[tverbeek]

I don't understand why someone would need this much computer equipment. It's like the guy with the Armani suit and Rolex watch driving a Lamborghini - he's compensating for something.

On the other hand, I drive a Geo Metro and ride a bike when weather permits. I'm definitely compensating for something. {grin} But the reason I have as much computer gear as I do is... it's fun.

Re:geek's overcompensating for something?

[Anonymous Coward]

What'd that PowerMac cost you in its day?

Re:geek's overcompensating for something?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

It's like the guy with the Armani suit and Rolex watch driving a Lamborghini - he's compensating for something.

Right, and maybe he just likes nice things. Ever put on an Armani suit? I don't like suits, but I'll make an exception for that one.

The joy of minimalism.

[gklinger]

I use to have an apartment filled with computers (I had a bit of a Sun fetish) and one day I just got fed up with the clutter so I decided to simplify my life. Now all I have is an Apple iBook and a Linksys WRT54GS and you know, I get a lot more done and I'm way happier.

Re:The joy of minimalism.

[ksheff]

operating a home for orphaned computers makes me happy. If I got rid of them all, I'd have an empty apartment.

My entry for today's pissing contest.

[TruthSeeker]

(and I know I'm on the losing side)

When not specified, AMD Athlon 2000+ or more. Everything under Debian GNU/Linux, unless specified otherwise.

1x Dual CPU AMD 2400+ with UW SCSI, development and general duties
1x File server (box with 2 Tb of IDE drives)
1x AMD Athlon 64 3000+, specific web server
1x Mail server
1x Web server
1x External router (Pentium 90 with 48Mb of RAM)
1x Internal router (Random AMD)
1x CVS / IRC server
1x Backup server (formerly with tape, now with RAID 1 SATA(n) HDDs)
1x News server (Pentium Pro ... can't remember the freq)
2x General purpose client computers
1x Epson laser printer, direct network interface
1x Laptop (3.4Ghz Intel P4)
1x "Game console" (AMD 3500+ with a nice nVidia 6800U in it)
4x Generally useless and old computers.

Re:My entry for today's pissing contest.

[TruthSeeker]

The laptop is probably only at 2.4 Ghz ... Not really sure, and it's 4AM here - not the time to go and check.
The "game console" is the only thing running WinXP here.
Did I mention 3 switches, 2 DSL modems and a cable modem?

Print Server

[kevin_conaway]

Do you really need a dedicated machine for a print server? You're a packrat my friend. There is help out there for you.

To answer your question, I have a router -> desktop and laptop

and the point being...

[zeromemory]

What is the point of this discussion other than to show off?

Re:and the point being...

[BJH]

I agree, it's kind of silly, but it can be interesting to see what everybody else out there has.
Certainly most (all?) of us don't need those old machines, but they're a hobby.
It's like guys down at the country club comparing the contents of their golf bags, except most of us use our machines for some semi-practical (if not entirely sane) purpose.

Now we've got the justifications over, here's my Big Dick list ;)
Just the interesting stuff, of course...

1 x Compaq ML350, PIII@1.13GHz x 2, 768MB RAM, Ultra160 SCSI 36GB x 5 in RAID-5, Fedora Core
5 x Compaq DL360, PIII@1GHz x 2, 640MB RAM, Ultra160 SCSI 18GB x 2 in RAID-1, OpenBSD
1 x Sun Ultra2, UltraSPARCII@400MHz x 2, 640MB RAM, Solaris (with an ATM155-MMF card that used to talk to one of the Compaqs)
1 x Sun Ultra80, UltraSPARCII@450MHz x 4, 4096MB RAM, Solaris
1 x Fujitsu Primepower200, SPARC64GP@400MHz x 2, 2048MB RAM, Ultra160 SCSI 18GB x 18 in RAID-5, Solaris (can't run this one too much, as it sucks about 2KW)
1 x Digital AlphaServer200 4/233, 21064A@233MHz, 64MB RAM, RedHat Linux (haven't touched this one in a while...)
1 x Digital PW-600au, 21164A@600MHz, 256MB RAM, Vine Linux
1 x Digital AlphaPC64, 21064A@275MHz, 192MB RAM, Vine Linux (built from surplus motherboard)
1 x Apple Quadra 700, 68040@25MHz, 24MB RAM, NetBSD
1 x Apple PowerMacintosh 700, PPC601@80MHz, 96MB RAM, MacOS + MkLinux
1 x Apple PowerBook520c, PPC603@132MHz? (upgraded with a PPC CPU board), 32MB RAM, MacOS (since nothing else will run on this)

Re:and the point being...

[BJH]

Dammit, knew I'd get one wrong - that's a PowerMac 7100, not 700.

Me too!

[ThinkingInBinary]

Let's see...

• centipede: Crappy Verizon DSL modem. 'nuff said.
• spider: WRT54G (the Linux version ... w00t), running dormant Earthlink IPv6 firmware
• squirrel: 900 MHz PIII Celery, 256 MB RAM, 160 GB 7200 RPM HDD, broken CD-ROM, Aopen MX3S mobo, random old VGA card, 3COM 3c905 (got a stack of 'em lying around somewhere), SoundBlaster PCI128. Duties: IPv4 firewall/DSL router, IPv6 tunnel endpoint, VPN endpoint, web server, FTP server, etc... (general "everything" box)

Um, yeah. That's about it. Hardware donations happily accepted.

All I need:

[Bombcar]

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 2.6T 814G 1.8T 32% /

And:

50 inch Panasonic Plasma.

My personal "datacenter"

[paulius_g]

It's not much, but it's sure worth it. I'm always very caring towards eectric bills and consumption:

{Names of the peripheral on the network}
Description
[Indicates where it is connected to]

1) {MODEM} DSL Router SpeadStream 5000 series (Unsure of exact number, normal residential 200KBps) [hooked up to the "router"'s eth0]
2) {ROUTER} 200MHz Pentium 1 MMX, 2GB HDD and 48MB RAM running a Linux router distribution. Doubles as a webserver. (Yes, it's ipcop)
3) {SWITCH1} 5 port 100mbit modded* D-Link switch [hooked to eth1 on the router]
4) {LOGGY} 800MHz P3, 256MB RAM, 3 HDDs (110GB total) storage/torrent/VNC box running CentOS 4.2 [SWITCH1]
5) {iMac} 233MHz, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD shoutcast radio [SWITCH1]
6) {PauliusMac} 1.25GHz G4, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD. Mac mini. Main computer (I'm writing this post on it!) [SWITCH1]
7) {SWITCH2} Modded* Microsoft MN-520 wireless access point and switch. [connected to switch1]
8) {FAMILY} Gaming computer. 3GHz P4, 1.5GB RAM, 80GB SATA, X600 PCI-E. Dual boots XP with CentOS. [SWITCH2]
9) {PauliusLap} Laptop. AMD 2500+, 512MB RAM, 60GB. CentOS 4.2 [Wireless to SWITCH2]
10) {Grandma} Grandma's computer. P3 450MHz, 128MB RAM, 40GB HDD. Windows XP SP2 (switching to Linux when I'll have time) [Wireless to SWITCH2]
11) {AREA51} Testing server. 400MHz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 4.2GB HDD (Yes!). Windows Server 2003 (Arrgh!) [SWITCH2]
12} {HPC} Miniature Jornada 680e. 133MHz SH-3, 16MB RAM, 128MB CF HDD. Linux 2.6 busybox. [Wireless to SWITCH2]
13) {SWITCH3} 8 port 100mbit switch. Reserved for future use. Unmodded.
14) {TINY} 500MHz P3, 128MB RAM, 30GB HDD. CentOS Linux testbed. [Probably to SWITCH1]

That's all. Yes, it took me a long time to write and it's confusing.

* Modded means that the processor of the switch was equiped with a heatsink and a fan has been carved in the plastic case. Both the two switches are on top of the another so they share the same fan. The fan is a old CPU fan which has a MOLEX adapter taken from LOGGY because LOGGY is the closest 24/7 machine to it with a decent PSU.

Missing

[Anonymous Coward]

20. Life

Any excuse to rattle the list off...

[agtcovert01]

• 1 Shark something-or-other rack, kindly donated from work when they had no need of it.
• 1 Dell Poweredge 4400, 2x 1ghz xeon's, 18 GB RAID1 array, 275GB RAID5 array Win2k3, fileserver
• 1 Dell Poweredge 500SC, P3 1.13ghz, 1GB ram, 36GB storage, Win2k3, domain controller
• 3 Belkin UPSes of various capacity
• 1 dual xeon 2.8ghz, 74GB/320GB storage, 2GB ram; runs OpenSuse, apache/app server
• 1 Athlon 1.4ghz, 1GB RAM, 120GB RAID1; FreeBSD, mailserver, mysql, apache
• 1 AMD64 3200+, 1GB ram, 160GB storage, workstation
• Netopia DSL router courtesy SBC, 3mbit DSL via SBC, 1 Sonicwall SOHO2 firewall, 1 16 port netgear switch, 1 8 port netgear switch
• 1 HP Officejet printer

Virtualization

[$exyNerdie]

With VMWare offering the Server product for free (after competition from Microsoft), I am all for consolidation of hardware. My plan is to get a dual quad-core processor (when they come out in a year or two) machine with 4 Gig of RAM and run the virtual server on it to run all the OS's I run on the multiple machines. Saving of space and power....

and here: http://www.vmware.com/products/server/ (it is in Beta but works great and release version will be free as well)

Re:Virtualization

[analog4]

I have plans to do the exact same thing. I was able to get 4 3.4GHz Xeon "Nocona" awhile ago and just recently got a board (both for free).

I'm going to build up a machine that will run multiple VMware machines on them. Hopefully I can not use as many machines (in fact, I can run more at the same time if I needed) and lower the power bill.

I'm a minimalist

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a sysadmin. I have:

* an intel Linux server (running several machines in VMWare)
* a 17-inch powerbook (plus an outboard 23-inch monitor)
* a soekris-powered router

plus

* biomorph desk
* aeron chair

and that's it. Every couple of years I update to the latest and greatest and get rid of the previous models.

I also like minimal art, minimal music, and so forth.

typical eclectic geeknet

[tverbeek]

I have what I consider a fairly modest home network, with any of the following online over the course of a typical week:

• a couple Mandriva Linux servers (dns, mta, imap, http, nfs, smb) mutually redundant
• generic Mandriva Linux workstation for daily e-mail/web client activities
• Mac G3 All-In-One next to the Mandriva workstation, for internet stuff that doesn't work easily on Linux.
• PowerMac G5 in the studio for graphics/illustration work, iTunes, DVD-watching
• iBook G3 with Airport for casual web surfing or writing around the house/yard
• WRT54G for the above G3
• TiVo series 1, slightly hacked
• Toshiba laptop running WinXP, most of my legacy/Win-only apps, and my Mustek USB A3 scanner
• Celeron box running Win98SE with an old-fashioned serial port for backing up my beloved Psion Revo PDA (and emulating it when/if it dies)
• Psion Revo, the best (for me) PDA ever made
• compact Dell 486/33 running Coyote Linux as router/firewall
• compact Dell 486/33 running LRP-based print server software, with li'l HP LaserJet and DeskJet attached
• SpeedStream SDSL adapter connecting me to Speakeasy
• assorted cheapo 10/100 hubs and switches holding it all together
• assorted rebated UPSes, and a petrol-powered 1KW generator in case of extended power outage

Depending on my mood and willingness to waste electricity, other stuff that might be online includes:

• Gateway Celeron running BeOSMax R5
• Mac Quadra running System 7.5.5 and MacHTTP
• Mac SE with Asante SCSI ethernet adapter, running System 7.0 and MacHTTP
• Compaq monochrome 486 laptop running Win31 and ZBServer
• Compaq 386 running Coyote Linux and thttpd

Last but not least:

[Anonymous Coward]

20. Having enough space to store all the porn in the world - priceless.

My job isn't like that, unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I had that kind of time!

I'm a fashion model photographer, so most of my time is spent away from computers (I use an assistant to work out the photoshopping). I do know that at the rate that my hard disks are filling up that I could definitely use a data center upgrade. But I just don't have the time to fiddle with that.

Here's a description of what I am busy doing:

1 Fucking supermodels
2 Snorting coke with supermodels
3 Going to clubs with supermodels
4 Fucking supermodels
5 Attending runway events
6 Pillow fights with supermodels (group)
7 Attending gala openings
8 Attending White House dinners (not so much these days, though)
9 Travelling to exotic locales (this takes a surprising amount of time)
10 Fucking supermodels
11 Evaluating photo equipment
12 Eating whip cream off the naked bodies of supermodels
13 Photographing other supermodels performing #12
14 Deep sea fishing
15 Scuba diving
16 Racing sports cars (hobby)
17 Attending meet & greets with heads of state

That's not quite 19 like you've got, but it keeps my busy. Too busy to do what I really love: Setting up home networks and fiddling with the audio drivers in Linux.

Re:My job isn't like that, unfortunately

[plumby]

Have you ever considered you might be on the wrong site?

Much as I can't be bothered to play the "my data centre's bigger than yours" game, I'm not going to mock those that want to. Most people come here (I assume) to discuss geeky stuff, and you must be pretty desperate to prove your superiority if you think that taking the mickey out of the /. crowd for doing that is big/clever.

Similar setup...

[temojen]

1 SMC "Barricade G", 1 Athlon XP 2200 with 2x80GB and 1x250GB drives (JBOD, but If I could afford 3 250's, it'd be raid-5) turned off when I'm not using it, 1 iBook, 1 film scanner, 1 flatbed scanner, 1 Monitor with 2 inputs, USB keyboard & trackball, USB switch.

Why the hell do you need a personal data centre?

[danielrose]

Delete some porn or something.. I mean I have shitloads of stuff and all I have is one 80GB and one 20GB ide drives......

54 Mbps...

[Anonymous Coward]

• ...802.11g connection to neighbor's 6 megabit pipe.
  
• 2+ GB e-mail account with Gmail
  
• 5+ terabytes of music from Pandora*
  
• instead of bookmarks, www.google.com as homepage: instant access to 8+ billion web pages.

And the thick client?

• late model AMD chip.
  
• 1 gig RAM.

Oh, and try to figure out the dollar value of the sys admin salaries that go into guaranteeing uptime, timely backups, etc.

Much easier: how much is my electric bill for the hours my lights and computer are off at night?

* Pandora seems to play from all of iTunes. The iTune's music store says "Featuring more than 2 million songs", so at three minutes per song I calculate 5.3 terabytes

My setup at home

[Anonymous Coward]

Office
1. WinXP P4 w/ dual 17" monitors
2. APC UPS 1100
3. HP LaserJet w/ network card
4. HP ScanJet
5. HP Color InkJet
6. various external USB hard drives for backups

Family Room
7. Netgear switch in Family room
8. Hauppauge Media Center
9. TiVo Series 2 w/ 140 hours
10. APC UPS 350 for TiVo
11. 4 ch. cable modulator (TiVo, DVD, Media Center & VCR)

12. WinXP/Mandrake P4 for kids
13. APC UPS 500 for kids computer
14. Nikon CoolScan 5000 ED film scanner

Living Room
15. Mandriva 2006 PIII w/ 3x120 GB drives in RAID-5 config running file/web server & Galleon TiVo HME app server
16. Linksys WRT54G wireless/switch
17. APC UPS 750? for file server and switch
18. TiVo Series 2 w/ 80 hours
19. APC UPS 350? for TiVo

Wiring Closet
20. DSL Modem
21. Netgear 16 port 10/100 switch
22. Netgear RT311 firewall
23. TINI powered 1-wire weather station with wind speed/direction, 6 temp sensors, barometer and rain gauge
24. APC UPS 600 for networking gear
25. 2x4 Video Distribution Amp
26. APC UPS 600 for video amp so TiVo's have cable signal during black out

Laptops
27. WinXP/Mandriva 2006 w/802.11G
28. Win98/Mandrake 2005 LE w/802.11B

Recently gave original TiVo series 1 (hacked of course) and APC UPS to mother-in-law so that was 3 networked TiVo's for about a month!

Before wireless took off, I ran spools of Cat-5 and Coax. I didn't run enough to specific areas like the wiring closet and media centers so I'm having to deploy older switches.

And don't get me started on my x10 inventory. Literally every room but the bedrooms can
have the lights remotely controlled via the computers.

my impressive setup

[Anonymous Coward]

2 dell dimensions, a inspiron xps, and a linksys slug.

And about 14 broken servers/workstations scattered around the basement, attic, garage, and hallway closet which I promise I'll fix one day and set up that beowulf cluster I've always been imagining.

Hmmm - now to find out the real names behind the..

[GuyverDH]

Sheesh - and now everyone on Slashdot has a nice shopping list of components - with a little hard work, a location to shop....

LOL....

Keeping my list of equip private...

Feh! Thats NOTHING!!

[Anonymous Coward]

22x 3Ghz Pentium 4's doing nothing but cranking out code for SETI
104x 20" iMac's.. uh, cuz Steve Jobs said I needed them?
126 4GB Fiber Channel cards to tie it all together
2 (yes, just 2) 77TB Hitachi 9980v Fiber Channel frames
22x 32 port Brocade 4100 4GB FC switches
1x 8mm tape backup unit (gotta save money SOMEWHERE) (ok, so it takes 3 years do to an incremental backup)
31231231x power bill

Top THAT!

Four Beowulf clusters of Dual Athlon 4800.

[Wolfier]

To back everything up just issue a single command: cp -R ~ /dev/null

Chucked It

[the eric conspiracy]

I used to have an elaborate home network but found that it interfered with having a life, so I've been consolidating. I'm down to the following:

1 Windows Laptop
1 Linux Laptop
1 dual core x1 CPU Linux workstation
1 Samsung CLP-550 color laser printer
1 HP Jetdirect print server
1 8 port GB switch
1 Cisco PIX501 firewall
1 Wireless Access Point

The workstation, Cisco and switch (and calbemodem) are the only things that are left on 24x7. The workstation is pretty heavily optimized to minimize power consumption so the the whole set runs on about 100W idle. That works out to less than $100/yr where I live.

I wasn't going to do this, but oh well.

[karnal]

1. Bay Networks 350-24T 100MB Managed Layer 2 Network Switch
2. Netgear WGR614 (I think) - using for wireless G only.
3. Sipura box - broadvoice phone access
4. APC Smart 900 UPS w/2 battery modules (3+ hour runtime)

Now, here's the servers:

5. Custom Built AMD K6-2 450 firewall, Fedora Core 4
6. Custom Built AMD Athlon 900, file server Fedora Core 4

And end nodes:

Computer Room:
7. My main gaming rig, XP2800+6600GT+Santa Cruz, 1 19" crt and 1 15" lcd.
8. Wife's rig, XP2100+5700LE+Riviera, 1 19" crt.
9. Side Laptop, Dell, wireless G or wired if at my desk.

Other Rooms:

10. Family Room: AMD Sempron 2600+, running SageTV for DVR duties w/PVR-500.
11. Living Room: AMD Athlon XP2800+ connected to projector, custom screen.
12. Music Room: AMD K6-2 450, used to play music to jam along to (have drums, guitar and bass, and various amps etc)
13. Garage(detached, buried 2 cat5): Intel Pentium 200mmx; when I'm working on the cars, again, like music...

I also have a Thinkpad 390X with shattered PCMCIA slots; has 1 USB 1.1 Port, so I can connect to the network using a USB-ethernet box... although I haven't used it in about a year.
Also have a Pentium Pro 200 that used to be a firewall, and an additional K6-2 500 that my parents had (and destroyed)...

All networking lines have been personally run by me, and it shows - I've gotten more and more into network and voice wiring over the years, even making a big bunch of change for my wedding pulling in cable and punching down etc. Of course, the latest runs I've done are all dressed and professional -- go figure....

And I do have a rack, KVM, Extender, etc. All cables terminate on a patch panel, 1' cables to the ethernet switch... I try to keep everything neat.

Bow down before me boys...

[macshit]

• 400 Mhz PIII I was given for free (along with 512 MB memory and motherboard!)
  
• No-name crappy heavy case
  
• 4 GB SCSI disk I bought used for $20
  
• Video card I bought out of the "africa doesn't want 'em" pile for $7 ("Will this card work with X?" "Maybe")
  
• Flaky-ass 15" CRT (god I hate this thing; nothing has straight edges on my monitor...)
  
• Happy-hacking Lite2 keyboard -- ahhh the good stuff!
  
• No self respect

It's not the size of your personal data center

[Slashcrunch]

It's not the size of your personal data centre, but how you use it. At least thats what I heard anyway.

Really, who needs a personal data centre when I have a shiny red sports car? :)

Well :) I have better uptime then my work...

[Fallen Kell]

Lets see where to begin...

Network Gear:
Linksys WRT54G Hardware Ver 2 Wireless 802.11g
Linksys SRW2016 16 Port GigE 10/100/1000 + 2 mGBic Port Managed Switch (network backbone)
Netgear ProSafe JFS524F 10/100Mbps Switch + 1 100FX Slot
Linksys WET54G 54Mbps Wireless Ethernet Bridge

UPS Units:
2x APC Back-UPS XS 1500VA UPS's

Computer Infrastructure:
Sun UltraSparc60 w/ 2x 450 Sparc 2i CPU's, 2 GB RAM, 2x 10GB 10k RPM SCSI (Webserver, Database Server)
Intel P4C 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, 1.5 TB disk space (Fileserver)
AMD Athlon X2 4400+, 2GB RAM, 600GB disk space, nVidia 7800GTX, Dual TV Tuners (Home Theater PC/media center)
2 laptops
2 other PC's used for webbrowsing and word processing

Yeah, my network is a little overkill now that I have the GigE switch. I also have some other appliances in the home which use the network, GameCube, PS2, etc., which use up a number of my network ports, which is the reason that I have so many. But out of all this, my battery backup is what really keeps me going strong. I can keep my main infrastructure (fileserver, wireless router, GigE, cable modem, media center PC, etc.) all powered for about 45 minutes before the computers are automatically shutdown. I have been debating getting the extended battery packs for the UPS's I have which would make them 3000VA each, but I think that might be a little overkill.....

Queerest Ask Slashdot. Evar.

[Gothmolly]

This is the equivalent of either a dick-size or old-school engine displacement war. Its nothing than more Slashdot navel-gazing, about how über we all are, vs. the unwashed masses, with a subtle MS bash thrown in.

Instead of a "what trinkets do you have?" Ask Slashdot, how about a "Whats needed in a home lab?" Ask Slashdot question? Otherwise it degenerates into a wallet-size competition, or an obscure "my firmware version on my Linksys is better than yours because Fry's is teh suck, CompUSA is teh r0XX0r!" discussion.

Next questions from the content-with-no-value dept.: "What do you drive?" Or "What did you have for breakfast?"

Too many machines...

[Anonymous Coward]

Moved back in with my parents during renovation on my house, so there's enough bits + pieces for probably two 'personal data centers'. This is just a list of stuff that is on.
1 x WBEL4 NFS/CIFS storage box + Qemu Emulated Windows DC - Athlon1.4G/1G RAM(.9T of RAID5)
1 x WBEL3 NFS/CIFS storage box - K6-2 500/512MB RAM (380GB, misc disks)
1 x Windows Domain controller - 2xPII450MHz/768MB RAM (160GB of RAID1)
1 x Windows File server - Athlon 1.6G/768MB RAM (193GB, misc disks)
1 x CentOS 4 DAAP server - PII450MHz/256MB RAM (160MB of RAID5)
3 x Windows XP workstation - various athlon(64)s/1GB RAM (~160GB per)
2 x Windows XP laptop - Dell Inspiron 8200 - P4 1.8/650MB (40GB)
2 x Windows 2000 workstation
            - Athlon 2.6G/1G RAM (80GB ATA/100)
            - K6-2 500/256MB RAM (8G ATA/66)
1 x Windows VMWare Server box - 2xCeleron 533/768MB RAM (9GB of RAID1, 350GB of RAID5)
2 x FreeBSD 'misc' box
            - K6 233/256MB RAM (88GB, misc disks)
            - 2xPPro200MHz/512MB RAM (18GB of RAID5)
1 x YDL4 box - 603ev 240MHz/96MB RAM (8GB ATA/33)
3 x 3Com Superstack III Ethernet switches (24 ports @ 10/100)
2 x OpenBSD Router - PI100MHz/96MB RAM (512MB CF Card)

The only notable thing off is 1 x WBEL4 'misc' box - 2xPIII500MHz/3G RAM (250GB ATA/66)

Home Datacenter

[slakdrgn]

I'm lucky to have a room seperated from the house that contains most of my equipment. Powerbill is managable with proper power management but can get nasty during the summer here in FL.

Servers (In older white/beige HP rack)
- (1) No name 4U case running P4 1.6 w/1GB RAM and 2x80gb (web/mail/ftp - basic stuff, slackware 9)
- (1) Compaq Proliant DL360 G4 (2x3.6GHZ Xeon, 4GB RAM 2x146gb local and 7x146gb via storageworks drive array all ultra320 scsi) running Windows 2003 Server, this runs a couple of virtual servers for development, testing and general futzing around with
- (1) Compaq Proliant DL140 (1x2.0GHz Xeon, 2GB RAM, 2x80GB IDE) running windows 2000 server, favorite gaming flavor of the moment

Network Equipment (also in HP rack though some not mountable)
- (1) Teryon cable modem from brighthouse
- (1) Cisco PIX 501 firewall/vpn had to purchase addt'l licensing :(
- (2) WRT54G (v1.1 and v2.0) one for inside and one for outside. My house was built in the 50s and due to this wiremesh in the drywall, it acts like a faraday cage, have to use one outside to get signal by the pool
- (2) HP procuve switches 24-port 2524 with fibrechannel transceivers to connect the server room and the house

The rest of the equipment is general stuff like my computer, my wifes, my daugthers and my father-in-law's (he lives with us). Have a couple for guests and a mythtv box in the bedroom. my wife and I both have laptops from work also and a romaing sony vaio tr2ap.

Most of the home equipment goes into standby or shuts off when not in use, some is rarely used (laptop, visitor bedroom computer). The gaming server is shut down unless its in use, use WOL to turn it on without going to the server room. The DL360 has better power management and I can spin down drives when the server isn't in use. The outside wireless AP actually runs off solar/battery combo (an experiment of mine) but its rarely used anyways and typically powered off via the lightswitch outside.

Overall my power was much better than it was last year before I consolidated most of my servers with the single DL360 and implemented better power management in the house computers. The server room use to be a workshop built onto but not accessable from the house. Its locked up pretty tight (steel door, came that way just added some new locks) and you can't tell whats in it from the outside. A/C is provided from the house (was that way when I moved in). When power gets too expensive I shut it down unless I need it, at that point I use WOL to wake it up. Infact I rarely goto the server room once I got it all built to the way I like it.

less can be more

[LodCrappo]

I used to have a house full of PCs doing various things that really didn't need to be done. It's a hobby, its fun. A few years ago I decided to take a different path. Instead of spending time finding out how many things I could get connected to my network, I tried to get rid of as much as possible without losing any functionality. The results have pleased the gf as well as reducing my power bill by $50+/month.

Start with the firewall.. I had a Dell server running linux and iptables, freeswan, traffic shaping etc. It rarely even broke a sweat as a firewall, although I really liked having a linux shell on my edge router for testing purposes.. nothing beats tcpdump for figuring out whats going on, and you can't get that type of functionality from even a fancy hardware firewall.

Or can you? Enter the linksys WRT54G. It's a tiny little box with no moving parts. It essentially has 5 nics which can be grouped into switches. It has a 802.11g interface and allows easy connection of big antennas. But most importantly, it runs linux. It runs linux, iptables, tc etc very well, and all the diagnostic tools I wanted to have are still available. This thing has easily paid for itself in power saved.

Next stop, the file server. We all need a box that runs 24/7 and stores massive amounts of files (read pr0n). Once again, I was able to replace a full server with a tiny box. This one is called the linksys NSLU2... a tiny box with two usb ports and a nic. It runs linux, actually it runs Debian which is incredible and kind of blows my mind. But anyways, now all my files are served up by this little thing. It also runs postfix and does some network monitoring for me. Another great feature is that since the drives are all USB, I can turn off the ones that have things I don't need all the time on them. When I need something off them, just turn the drive on and a few seconds later its available.

Third and final optimization was my combination of both a linux and a windows desktop. Todays PCs are really fast, kind of ridiculously fast if you arent playing the latest shoot em up. VMware is free now, and I have found that as long as you have plenty of ram, running linux on win or win on linux are both very usable. So two desktop machines have become one with an extra GB ram. Even better, I can fire up an extra windows box if I want to test something that I don't trust on my real machine (experimenting with WMF's and such) or an extra linux box to try out a new distro etc...

So I've gone from 4 PCs that ran 24/7 to one (and of course a laptop, and a hx4700 ppc, etc etc The small toys don't count ;). I originally thought that these little devices would be unreliable, after all they are pretty cheap. But, both currently have uptimes over 100 days. I even kept the firewall/wireless ap running during a hurricane here last year, they run forever on a ups that wouldn't keep a PC running 15 minutes. It's suprising how quiet the office has become. Over time you don't notice the noise that several PCs can make, but it's significant. I can watch TV in there and hear it without disturbing anyone late at night. The room used to be significantly hotter than all the other rooms in my house, now it's not noticable. I've reclaimed a huge amount of space in my office. Sure, visitors might not immediately realize that I am a total geek, but sometimes that's ok.

PS I don't mean to be advertising Linksys stuff.. you can get similar devices that run the same firmwares and linux distros from other vendors. Check out http://www.openwrt.org/ and http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ for more info.

Re:less can be more

[kwerle]

Or can you? Enter the linksys WRT54G. It's a tiny little box with no moving parts. It essentially has 5 nics which can be grouped into switches. It has a 802.11g interface and allows easy connection of big antennas. But most importantly, it runs linux. It runs linux, iptables, tc etc very well, and all the diagnostic tools I wanted to have are still available. This thing has easily paid for itself in power saved.

I had one of those, and it burned out after a couple of years. OK, so I bought another one. It burned out after a couple of years. Meanwhile, my FreeBSD box had been running for 6? A long time, anyway. I've become really pissed off at linksys. I know a lot of people love those boxes - I used to. Maybe I had bad luck - I dunno, but it'll be a while before I buy anything from them again.

I bought a damn netgear (dumb - not linux) router. Damn thing will lock up on me every once in a while, so I have it hooked up to a christmas light timer that shuts it off at 3am for about 15 minutes. Has been no trouble since - if you can call that no trouble.

Bottom line: I'm sick to death of these cheap little wireless routers. Emphasis on cheap. So I'll probably end up with another PC as a router sooner or later. I sure wish my Mac Mini had 2 real 100baseT ports.

Re:less can be more

[LodCrappo]

Interesting.. AKAIK the Linksys WRT54G was first sold in the US in early 2003. Even if you purchased one of the first batch, and it burned out in 2 years, and then you bought another, and it did the same, this puts you somewhere in early 2007. Care to share the contents of a recent newspaper? Really, I don't disbelieve that you had a bad experience. But one of your devices had to be a 1st gen practically prototype version. The second was still probably older than my first. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get something right, and sometimes the right software makes bitter hardware better. What firmware were you running on these failed devices?

Re:less can be more

[kwerle]

It may well have been less than 2 years each (certainly it seems so from your numbers); I try to be generous even when I'm pissed at the manufacturer. I'm thinking the firmware shouldn't much matter - both failed entirely - could not replace the firmware, reset, or anything (makes me think it was a blown capacitor or somesuch).

I'm CERTAIN that the 2nd one that failed had the latest firmware as of the end of last year. It blew out not long after I upgraded it (though it did run for a while).

Nothing fancy

[dtfinch]

I'm pretty frugal with my finances.

I have the following in front of me on my desk:
* Dell Dimension 2400 - 2.4ghz Celeron, 512mb, 80gb. Running CentOS 4.2. My primary desktop.
* IBM NetVista A30p - 1.8ghz Celeron, 512mb, 40gb. Running Ubuntu Dapper Flight 4. Yesterday ran Arch Linux 0.7.1. The day before it ran Gentoo 2005.1, for several weeks. It's my play system.
* eMachine eTower 500ix - 500mhz Celeron, 256mb, 80gb. Running XP Pro. My old desktop. I've never seen any other eMachine last so long.
* Two monitors (15" 1280x1024, 19" 1920x1440), two keyboards, two mice, two speakers, and a 2 port KVM switch.
* A 100mbit dlink router, a Linksys wireless router, and a cable modem.
* And the hard disk from my sister in law's recently purchased, now dead eMachine.

In my bedroom I have an old dotcom era server collecting dust, previously owned by Rocketdownload.com. It used to run NT4 Server. Now it runs Debian Sarge, when it's turned on at least. It's a 233mhz Pentium II, 96mb ram (up from 64), and two hard disks, 2gb and 3gb.

Also in this house, on this network, but not belonging to me:
* HP Pavillion - 2.8ghz P4, 512mb, 120gb. Running XP Home.
* Wintergreen (whatever) - Sempron (forgot speed), 256mb, 40gb. Wireless. Running Kubuntu Breezy.
* Some laptop - 333mhz, 64mb, 4gb. Windows 98.

Re:Nothing fancy

[jm92956n]

Up until this previous December, I had as my only computer an Emachines 500i. It had its original 10gb drive and (put on your jealousy hate) a full 128mb of RAM. I replaced it with another Emachine that I bought for next to nothing. I always ran stripped down Linux distros on it and the speed of it surprised everyone who used it. It still works fine, I just don't turn it on anymore.

I for one...

[guruevi]

Moved to the United Soviet States of R... America a few months ago and have already accumulated the following: APC SurgeArrest Personal (for things not hanging at the UPS - screens) APC Rackmount UPS (2200VA) Apple iBook G3 (128M RAM) HP Pavilion ze4400 (512M RAM) HP OfficeJet Copier/printer/fax/scanner Lexmark Inkjet printer (is a piece of crap, is going in my car) 2,8 GHz P4 (Gateway machine from someone who sold it for $200 because of some virus) 1G RAM Netgear 10-port switch 2x rackmount Longshine Manageable 24-port switches (need to replace fans, they are making quite some noise (that is also why they were discarded)) AMD Thunderbird 700MHz (is my backup machine - 4x80G RAID5 with Adaptec RAID-5 controller, 64M cache and BBU) (512M RAM) Cyrix 266MHz (is my router/firewall) with 128M RAM VIA C3 1GHz (is becoming my multimedia car PC - works on 12V) 19" rack - yup a complete 19" rack for among other things my switches complete with cable gutter, rails) I heightened the floor and lowered the ceiling (myself) Quad Power Mac G5 (2,5 GHz) with WD 2x 74G Raptor and 2,5G RAM Some loose discs (IDE/SATA) from 40G->250G for transport/backup in external enclosure. 4 Dish network rackmount HD-DVR (free installation in 4 rooms concentrated in my computer room - going into MythTV) 1 rackmount sattelite receiver for Dish Network 1 rackmount sattelite receiver for Internet connection 1 Cable/Sattelite modem Running dual Ethernet and 2 phone lines throughout the house (in every room)

I drive an 18 wheeler... no issues moving :)

[DaedalusHKX]

I drive an 18 wheeler... no issues moving :)

We went the opposite way

[Hardwyred]

When my wife and I built our house, I got the green light to geek it out. I installed 48 ethernet ports into a 50 port managed switch sitting in a rack full of 4U cases with full UPS coverage for all. I had 3 or 4 desktops at a time and computers abounded throughout the house. Now we are selling the house and moving so we have to strip everything bare, just the essentials left in the house (we still have to live here while we try to sell). All the desktops are gone, the rack is gone, the switch is still in place but mounted into a custom cabinet to make it fit in. We are down to a single server, UPS and 2 laptops but I gotta say, I'm really pleased. I discovered xen a few years back, switching to it from Usermode Linux. I now have a single box that acts like as many machines as I can afford RAM for. The computers in the bedroom that used to run mythtv frontends were replaced with Hauppauge MediaMVPs. The laptops go everywhere we go and the rest of the gear I gave away. My UPS tells me that I went from drawing on average over 12 amps to a measly 1.8. Tell me I didn't notice that on my monthly power bill, and that was just at the rack!

Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Sloppy]

How long is your penis?

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[4D6963]

How long is your penis?

Excellent idea. Let's show the world and its female inhabitants how us Slashdotters are exceptionally well endowed, a little bit of that type of advertisement can't hurt our inexisting sexual lives.

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

How long is your penis?

This question isn't important. The more important question is whether it is being used by others.

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whip it out, and slap it on your keyboard.
asdfghjk
Okay, I made it to 'k'. Can anyone beat that?

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[gnud]

How does your personal pleasure center measure up?
My job allows me too meet many well endowed people. Invariably we get to talking about our wangs. I've run across some very sophisticated tadgers. Some people I've met have enough to have themselves classified as "hung like a fucking horse". They run this at home, and usually just for the hell of it. How do the stiffys of Slashdot readers measure up?" How long is your member?
"Here's a description of mine:"

Okay, CUT!

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[gerardlt]

I using on of these you insensitive clod!

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're either

a) Lying or

b) Using the keyboard on a PDA

Which is it?

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Sponge Bath]

Approximately 7.58E-4 furlongs.

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Profane MuthaFucka]

From the bottom of the keyboard, I only hit the 'B' key. Don't feel sorry for me though, I can also hit both ctrl keys at the same time.

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually would not be a dumb thing to ask if you are interested in the average international + allot of americans geek dick-size. Would be interesting to compare it to other non-geek ethnic groups in society and see if they really really have bigger dicks and that is why they get all the chicks.

Also we would probably hit a record of anonymous posters in 1 story;
also we would probably hit a record of non-truthful and truthful posts in one story;
and so on, you get me point!

Re:Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Lost_Wolf]

Funny... you missed the caps lock key

Well, lets see...

[CFD339]

As I live in a rural location, until recently I had a $1500/mo. Level 3 T1, but I've since outsourced my public facing servers to rented boxes at ServerBeach. Now its just consumer grade IP for me (which sucks if you have to upload anything).

When I had the addition put on the house, the walls were opened up enough so I ran 5000 feet of cat5e. Now every room has at least one network drop box, which has 4 cat5e RJ45 ports and 2 RJ11. The master bedroom and living room have two of these and my office has 4.

The drops come back to the server room off my office. They terminate in a 96 port patch panel. Patch cables tie them to 100mb Ethernet switches, and one gigabit switch. The servers and the machines in my office use the gigabit switch.

There is a sonicwall that ties the cable connection in to the network. Good device, crappy company. Its a leftover from when I had the T1. There is also DSL, which comes into one of three Linksys WRT-54G routers. The linksys routers run Alchemy firmware, and work as a single cloud. The secondary ones simply act as repeaters. As a result I serve IP to my neighbors across the street and next door.

I leave the wifi "open" and free to use, but consider it "hostile" so the next stop is a Fedora Core 4 linux box acting as a firewall for the dsl side. (The next step, not yet taken, is to set up bandwidth optimized and failover based routing, using both data paths to terminate at my linux box at serverbeach. This should resolve the slow upload issue).

As you can see, I believe in failover. Every piece of equipment is protected by line stabilizing UPS units, and an LP Gas standby generator (15kw) kicks on within a minute if there is a power loss. Remember, I'm rural. In addition, because I'm an officer with a call fire department, when we do lose power, I'm not there to pull out a portable. I'm on a fire truck keeping the idiots away from the down lines.

For servers I have a W2k3 box (for now) and a fedora core 4 linux box, as well as an old win2k box. These can all be consolidated to a good linux box when I get time.

Workstation is a P4 2.8ghz HT w/ a pair of SATA 80gb drives in RAID-0 and 2gb of ram. A Radeon 128 serves a 19" NEC monitor and a 17" Viewsonic.

Laptop is an Inspiron 8200 -- due for replacement when I can reasonably buy an Athlon 64 dual core tablet machine with a 17" screen and 2gb of ram. I travel with Dlink router and an IAXY device from Digium so that my phone follows me to whatever hotel room I'm in.

Spousal unit has a P4 2.8ghz HT machine with 1gb. Two kids have old Celeron based workstations for schoolwork and internet (Squid proxy & Dan's Guardian prevents the 12 year old from porn surfing). Third child is using an old iMac G3 Blueberry. A G4 eMac with 1gb sits in the living room. Mostly it just holds down the table.

Phone system is entirely Asterisk based, trunked to the production box at serverbeach.

Cell phone is a Motorola e815 because with sdk I could open the bluetooth, it does 80% of what an expensive PDA can do, and when I rush to the firestation and and it skitters across the floor while I'm jumping into my gear, I'm not losing $500 worth of kit.

Lots of other stuff, but it mostly sits on shelves.

Re:Well, lets see...

[muhgcee]

Haha...former Serverbeach datacenter monkey here :-)

Re:Well, lets see...

[CFD339]

What little experience of their datacenter monkeys I've had isn't really very positive. I stay with them because for now I havne't come across a better deal. The next machine I switch to will be in their Virginia or LA data center though -- not in San Antonio which I did not sign up for and didn't realize until I'd been placed there.

I've had a couple of instances of processor overheat and had to auto-reboot. I've had two instances of routing problems on their end, and in both cases it took WAY too long to fix and at no time did they even bother to update the ticket to say they were working on it. Once, when only one of 5 addresses wasn't routing, the minute they got the ticket they took the whole rest of the server offline for hours until they fixed their routing problem.

Good price, decent box, crappy support so far.

AP

Re:Well, lets see...

[muhgcee]

Well...part of the reason they can give you such a good price is because of what they pay the employees. I was there for about 6 months.

But yeah, I worked in the VA DC. It was nice.

scaled my stuff down this year

[cypherz]

My faithful dual monitor dual 1 ghz PIII box died this summer. Its untimely death lead to the purchase of 2 iMacs G5's both with external monitors and screen-spanning hack (1 gb of RAM in the GF's and 1.5 in mine. There's a cheesy DSL modem/firewall/access point (belongs to GF) connected to 2 8-port gigabit switches. The living room has a Mac Mini connected to the GF's television. There's an EyeTV on my iMac and a half-terabyte raid array for PVR storage. I can get to the PVR content from all the PC's using CyTV. There's also an EyeHome unit on one of bedroom TV that can access the PVR content. There's some notebooks: 1 Averatec cheapo (that has been great) 1 teeny HP notebook belonging to the GF, and a 17 inch HP monster desktop replacement notebook with 1.5 gb of RAM (OpenSuSE 10) with a couple of VM's that I use for my development environments. There's an old iBook wandering around the house as well. There's an ancient server box I built years ago with an AMD K6 and an MSI mainboard that just won't die and still serves as my development web server. It and runs gnump3d, privoxy and some other services.
Oh yeah, there's a Nokia web tablet and an old Zaurus on my network. There's also an SE-30, but I never boot it any more.

Meagre in comparison

[Apathetic1]

I have a meagre setup in comparison but it serves me well enough. I'm a student so I don't have a lot of disposable income to spend on toys. I've also been threatened with death if I bring home another computer without getting rid of one. Since it's not my house, I comply.

• 1 x OpenBSD DHCP / DNS / Web Server
• 1 x FreeBSD Secure Web / Subversion Server
• 1 x Windows Server 2003 Domain Controller so I can learn about Active Directory
• 1 x General Purpose Windows XP Desktop w. TV Tuner
• 1 x General Purpose Windows 2000 Laptop
• 1 x Mac Mini for a video editing project
• 1 x Obligatory C64

I see your Schwartz is as big as mine.

[cutecub]

... Lets see how you handle it.

-S

Good thing you're running OpenBSD

[Sloppy]

It would suck if you left your machines vulnerable to all those VAX exploits that are going around.

powned

[pintomp3]

after hacking cliff's datacenter, it is now mine. plus he pays my electricity bills on it. not sure why i need two print servers at home though.

logical data control, anyone?

[fbrchnl2112]

While my hardware is quite modest, at this hour I am managing:

* 35,095 assets in iTunes (277GB), which are rsync'ed hourly to a different hard drive

* 23,754 assets in iPhoto. Backed up weekly with Apple Backup 3.1 to another hard drive, which doesn't make me feel very good about recovering it.

* Many infinibytes of pr0n. Well, that's a joke. We're close, but not at, infinibytes. Mere petabytes.

fbr

My wasteful network

[ender-]

At this point I've got almost as many dead computers as live ones.

Live:
1. Game Machine: Athlon 64 2800+, GF6800GT, 1GB RAM, 810GB HD [610 Usable due to 200GB mirror] running WinXP & Ubuntu
2. Firewall: DEC Alpha 550Mhz LX164, 128MB, 40GB - A little overkill but replaced the P133 that recently died. Running Debian Sarge
3. P4 1.8Ghz, 1GB, 360GB HD - attempted HTPC & Fileserver still in testing
4. Athlon 700, 640MB RAM, 160GB [2 x 50GB & 1x 9GB SCSI] - in testing fileserver?
5. eMachines Celeron 1.? Ghz, 256MB, 40GB HD. Wife's business machine
6. Toshiba P3 700Mhz laptop, 384MB RAM, 40GB HD. In living room for general surfing.
7. AT WORK: P3 500Mhz, 512MB RAM, 11GB HD - Web/Email/FTP/Teamspeak server on Debian Sarge [at work until they make me take it off the network :) ]

Only the firewall and the laptop are generally on 24/7 at home.

Dead:
Dual PPro 200Mhz
Single PPro 200Mhz
P133Mhz
Sun Sparcstation 2
IBM PS/2 386

And of course I've get the Tivo, PS2 and Dreamcast going too.

At some point I'd like to get rid of most of that crap and just have a litle linksys router w/linux and a massive fileserver. My Game machine doesn't really need 800GB of HD's in it. It weighs a ton which sucks for LAN parties!

Heat is no problem but cooling sucks

[RedDirt]

Not a data-center per se, but it generally does what I want it to.

My most interesting machine is an Opteron 142 with 2gig of ram and a smidge less than 5tb of disk. This machine's job is to export its disks over a dedicated dual gigabit link to the front-end server - the idea being that when I want more space, I can add another machine full of drives and just mount 'em up on the front-end. The front-end server is an Athlon 64 with 1gig of ram and mirrored 300gb disks. Local storage on the front-end is used for my regular data and apps while space from the file bucket is only used to hold DVDs. The front-end runs the usual collection of stuff: Samba, Slimserver, Apache (for DokuWiki and a couple of other webapps) and Nagios. I do nightly differential rsyncs of /home to an external USB drive (have a couple three in the rotation, not that I'm paranoid about my data or anything).

A Mac Mini does adequately well for my web-surfing, instant-messaging and VOIP stuff and I've got a pair of Athlon 64 gaming machines that I use to get my WoW fix (yes, I group with myself - how else does one play an MMO when they hate people?) A Fujitsu Lifebook 7010D and a Danger Hiptop are my mobile device choices for when I go on my periodic, real-life-imposed fetch quests. Beyond that, I've got a Mini-ITX firewall, a tri-band D-Link access point and a small pile of Netgear 5-port gigabit switches. My only printer, an HP 8000, has a JetDirect card so I need no printserver machine. I've also got a number of older machines that don't get much playtime anymore ... (there's the old triumvirate of Shuttle cubes from when I used to drive my beastlord, cleric and mage around together in EQ, the Toshiba Libretto L5 which is now a glorified book reader mounted on my exercise bike, the other mini-itx machine from when I had delusions that I was going to do my own router distro, and so on.)

The part of my current setup that I find the most appealing is that it's not too noisy. The disk-array generates the most noise, but I was able to replace the screaming 80mm datacenter-class fans with some medium-speed PanaFlo parts and get it down to almost reasonable without sacrificing too much cooling. The gaming machines aren't overclocked at all and certainly aren't top of the line (A64 3200+ w/ Venice cores, GeForce 6600GTs, SeaSonic S12 power supplies, Thermalright XP-90 CPU coolers and dinky WD800JB hard drives) so they don't put out a lot of heat. You can hear their fans, but they're not obnoxious.

File bucket and front-end share a Best UPS Patriot Pro II and, according to a Kill-A-Watt meter, burn around 415 watts during file I/O benchmarking. With the Mac in TeamSpeak and the two gaming machines in WoW, I burn about 380 additional watts. The firewall, access-point and other network gear chew up another 50 or so watts. So, when I'm not at home to take advantage of stuff, I can turn most of the gear off and drop power consumption down to around 130 watts (50 for the router/networking stuff and 80 for just the front-end server). Prior to splitting the DVD storage off onto a separate box, I made it almost halfway through December without the heat kicking on. =P

Bah, this is getting too long. Time to shoot the programmer and ship the product.

Mine

[Spazmania]

Normally powered on:

1 Quad Xeon P3, Debian Linux, Sendmail server
1 Dual P3, Debian Linux, Web server
1 Athlon, Debian Linux, DNS and misc. server
1 Celeron, Debian Linux -- sentimental reasons, its in a custom wood-grain AT tower case and nothing later will fit in an AT case.
2 Single P3s, Debian Linux, firewall/routers for my two broadband links (1 Cox Business Cable @ 5mbps + 17 IPs, 1 Verizon Residential Fios @ 15 mbps). I used to do it with a single machine but Linux 2.4's policy-based routing gets some of the corner-cases wrong.
1 Sparc Ultra 5, Solaris, hosting for a friend.
1 Pentium Pro, Debian Linux, legacy web server whose software malfunctions on more current machines
2 3-com managed switches
1 Vonage phone adapter

Powered sometimes:
1 P4 2.8ghz, Windows 2000 (games and console)
1 Dual P3, used for bench-testing hard drives at the moment

Haven't been powered in a while:
1 Eight 85 mhz Sparcserver 1000 maxed out
1 Quad 40 mhz Sparcserver 670 with 4 Seagate 8-inch IPI hard drives running Solaris 2.5.1.
3 Sparc 20s
1 Sparc IPX
1 Sparc IPC
2 Old macs
2 Commodore 64s
1 Atari 800
Various Cisco routers
Various game consoles

And positively no garden gnomes. What kind of a freak has garden gnomes?

Much more minimalist...

[slamb]

Here's all I brought with me when I moved to California a year ago:

• Pentium Pro 180 with Fedora Core 3. It was my everything server, but it's been off since moving.
• Athlon 1GHz, with Fedora Core 3 and Windows XP. Was a desktop, now it's the everything server.
• 17" PowerBook 1GHz (personal laptop).
• 15" PowerBook 1.67GHz (work laptop).
• Dell Axim X30 (PDA). Don't really use it.

You don't need so many servers for home! I can only think of a few reasons you need many servers at once:

• You want to learn about high availability software.
• You want to play with different OSs simultaneously.
• You have different security domains.
• You care enough about your data to do automated network backups to another machine. (rdiff-backup is cool!)

Though for full disclosure, I should admit that my home systems aren't the whole story. I have a real machine co-located in one data center and a virtual one co-located in another.

One machine to rule them all - who needs more

[dbIII]

Why have multiple machines when you can hook two keyboards and two monitors to one reasonable machine and have them in different rooms? OK so I have a little 800MHz embedded VIA thing (smaller than mini-itx) for hot weather, a low power consumption bittorrent box and as portable network storage. OK - so I also have a win2k machine that I put together one night from spare parts lying around the house to install one program - but that doesn't count because the motherboard PS/2 connections are dead. OK - so I have an Atari ST - but it's really just an occasional serial terminal. OK - so the Nintendo DS gets linux on it this weekend and will hopefully be used to telnet into the embedded machine so I don't need to find a small screen.

I don't need any more than one computer - I can give up the others at any time.

Bloody hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really should leave this alone... but I won't. This is the network connected gear in my house.

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ running Windows XP as a client machine, mostly for games and to make my wife happy. Will be running VMWare server when I get around to it.
• Dell PII/233 running Debian, web/file/email/etc.
• AMD Athlon XP 1100+ running RHEL, slated to replace the Dell when I have time.
• Tivo Series 2. Yet another reason to keep around the Windows box, for now.
• Apple 15" PowerBook (G4 1.33). By far the most heavily used client machine. I don't use the Windows machine much now that I have this, unless I'm gaming or doing work in Java (Eclipse is a frickin' pig.).
• Xbox. I will probably get a 360 at some point -- my wife is a big fan of Rare games from the N64 days and wants to play Kameo.
• PS2. Not very useful on the network. Anyone know where I can find the Linux dev kit?
• Nintendo DS. Mario Kart is good mindless fun.
• An open AP that anyone in my neighborhood is free to use -- no WEP, no WPA, and a default SSID broadcast. On a limited subnet that also contains the Xbox, PS2 and Tivo [wireless].
• One NeXTcube and a NeXTstation. Currently cold, need to run another power circuit in the basement after getting a freezer and dehumidifier. ;) I didn't have room for the SGI Indy, so I passed that off to a friend.

I feel the need to explain the open AP. My personal opinion is that WEP is too weak to bother with, and my Tivo and DS don't do WPA.

It is a much harder sell to a jury or judge that someone could bypass the security measure like WEP than to explain that it is set as an open network, and that I'm allowing anyone to use it for free. I don't do anything illegal from my home, but I don't assume that other people won't use the AP for illegal things. It's a reasonable doubt defense assuming a judge or jury won't understand the technology. I also don't do anything on that network that could expose me to significant risk of data compromise.

ugh

[pupstah]

All this jibber jabber and not one "check out my cyberpenii NOC@home" picture.

sad sad.

Re:ugh

[StarHeart]

I almost posted a picture of my equipment, but decided not to out of a little paranoia.

My ePenis is pretty big

[slaker]

Four identical Athlon64/3000s, 1GB RAM, Gigabyte K8VM800 motherboards, 4x7k250s, 3x7k400s, 1xSP1614 PATA, 3Ware 8506-4LP, Intel Gbit NICs. These machines run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Someday I will get motivated enough to upgrade them to some other form of Linux.

Game Machine: Athlon64X2/4400. 3GB RAM. Soltek motherboard. PCIe X850 Pro. X-Mystique. 2x7k400s, 2 7k250s (SATA), 300GB Maxline, 2 SP1614Ns, 7k400 (all PATA). LiteOn DVD Burner. LiteOn 32x CD Burner (both on "SCSI Buddies" connected to an Adaptec 2940UW) - and yes, every drive bay in that P180 is full. 600W Enermax PSU, Onkyo TX-NR801. 21" Dell CRT, 19" Scepter LCD. Antec P180 case. This machine presently dual boots Windows Server 2003 Web Edition and SuSE 10.

HTServer: Athlon64/3500. 3GB RAM. Soltek motherboard. PCIe X800AIW . X-Mystique. 3Ware 7506-12. 10xPATA SP1614s, 2x7k250s. LiteOn DVD Burner. 5U case. Thermaltake 680W PSU. Machine runs 2000 Server. Integra DTR-8.2 Receiver. Samsung 60" DLP monitor.

TechStation (aka "Pokey"): AthlonXP/2500. 1GB RAM. Radeon 9600VIVO. 1x 120GB drive (either a Samsung or a Maxtor). 5-in-3 SATA enclosure that usually has nothing in it. Asus A7N8X. LiteOn DVD Burner. 15" LCD and 12-year-old 17" Mag display. Cybex Video Switch. Spends most of its time in SuSE 9.3, but it's mostly a hardware test machine, so I've got DOS and 2000 on it, too.

ComputerUnderMyBed: Sempron 3400, 1GB RAM. Radeon 9550. GA-K8VM800. 20" Samsung LCD. 2xSP1614Ns. Runs SuSE 10. Exists mostly so that I can send E-mail and remote control all the other computers from someplace comfortable. I am just that lazy.

Laptop: Thinkpad T40. 1.6GHz P4m. 1GB RAM. 80GB hard disk. It's a remote control for the other machines or "the office that lives in my car".

Laptop #2: Gateway MX7515: Athlon64/4000, 1GB RAM, 100GB slow-ass hard disk, DVD burner, 256MB X600 Pro graphics. I switch between an XP install and 2003 Web edition. Too damned heavy to carry around. I've been using it as a comic/ebook reader.

I'm using an 8-port TrendNet GigE switch at the moment, and a Sonicwall SOHO device for a firewall. I have a Linksys 802.11A+G router that I use for WLAN (2.4GHz is FAR too crowded for anything to connect in my apartment, though).

My ex-'s garage is home to the rest of my computers, mostly machines that I barely used, or used only for various client needs. My ex-'s partner uses them to copy DVDs, but I can "visit" them if I need to via VPN. These machines are mostly AthlonXPs of various stripes, and IBM P4 desktop, but there's also a Sparc 20, and an UltraSparc10, some Motorola StarMAX machines, an original Mac, several old Dell and IBM laptops and an HP PA-RISC machine. Also my old IBM RAID enclosures, my Cisco 9005 and most of my older spare parts .

Total storage for what I've got would be something like 12TB, but I'm pretty big on redundancy, so it's really more like 8TB.

My utility bill is about $210/month. :D

K.I.S.S.

[Usquebaugh]

Well,

        Dell P4 1.4, Debian $200
        internal PCI FPGA $100

        Understanding what a turing machine is, priceless

Be it ever so humble...

[Anonymous Coward]

• Athlon XP 3200+, 1GB, Radeon 9800 Pro 128, 200GB HD, 120GB HD - Primary desktop (XP Pro)
• Athlon 1GHz, 512MB, GeForce II GTS, 80GB HD, HP ScanJet 3c w. ADF - Scanning station (XP Pro)
• Athlon 1GHz, 256MB, TNT2, 4GB HD (x2) - MAME cabinet (Win98 in DOS mode)
• 500MHz Pentium III, 512MB, 160GB HD (x2), 40GB HD, 30GB HD - File server (Debian Sarge)
• 60MHz Pentium, 24MB - Firewall (Coyote Linux)
• Athlon XP 1900+, 512MB, 80GB HD - Game server (Debian Sarge)

Okay, so that last one doesn't technically count as being on my "home network" but the fact that my former employer is hooking me up with free co-lo makes it worth noting.

Not currently in use:

• 233MHz Pentium II, 256MB - Ex-file server (RedHat 9)
• Power Mac G3, beige - WTF? (MacOS 8.something)
• 150MHz Pentium, 32MB - Ex-primary desktop (RedHat 6?)
• Zenith laptop, 486, 16MB, active matrix - Sir Overheats-a-lot (Win98)

Home stuff

[StarHeart]

1 SDSL modem with 1.1/1.1 and 5 static ip addresses
1 Cable modem with 3/256 and 3 dynamic ip addresses
2 Netgear 5port 10/100 switches, one for cable and one for dsl
1 Dlink gigabit switch, for lan
1 Dlink wireless g router

1 web/mail/etc server running FC4 on Athlon 64 3500+, 1gb, 3x250gb WD SATA RAID5
1 desktop running FC development(at the moment) on Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2gb, 4x250 Seagate SATA RAID5
1 mythtv box running FC4 on P4 2ghz, 512mb, 80gb Maxtor PATA, 2xPVR150
1 test box(currently for playing with Xen) running FC5T3 on Athlon XP 2500+, 1gb, 40gb Maxtor PATA
1 laptop running XP Pro/FC4 on Athlon XP-M 2600+, 512mb, 30gb PATA
2 external usb2 hard drives, 120gb Maxtor PATA
1 rackmount ups, CyberPower 1500AVR, for computers
1 ups, GeekSquad(rebadged CyberPower) 685AVR, for modems, switches, etc
1 switched rack pdu, APC 7900, 8port, ethernet interface(remote rebooting)
1 kvm, Iogear 4port ps/2
2 monitors, 21", NEC MultiSync XP21

1 colo server, Celeron 2.4ghz, 1gb, 80gb PATA on 100mbit with 1500gb a month transfer and 8 static ip addresses

Various spare hard drives, monitors, case, video cards, etc

5 networks:
DSL
Cable
LAN
Wireless router, computers that can't get directly on the cable
Gigabit, crossover between server and desktop

The computers, excluding the laptop, are on at least three networks. They go out over their primary internet connection, but can be accessed over both cable and dsl. The dsl is mainly for the server and the cable is mainly for the other computers.

Re:Home stuff

[Yehooti]

I'll bite too. I have four main machines running XP, one is XP on an AMD 64 3500+, two XPs on later P4's, and an XP 64 on an Athlon 64 X2 4400+, though these are intermittent. The ones running constantly consist of a P4 (SUSE 9.3), and and Ath 64 X2 3800 running SUSE (10.0), as web and mail servers. Additional intermittent machines are a Windows 9800 SE box, and three older Red Hat boxes used for backup. In the active network are two occasional laptops running SUSE 9.3 and Windows XP. It's a jumble of stuff that makes sense to me, somehow. What fries my butt is moving files from one to the other. Security has so dominated my installation that I find it easiest to dump files into a PCI card when I want to transfer info. I was burned once and since then have taken draconian measures to keep their interfaces minimal. Some people collect old cars in their back yards. I get kicks out of adding older machines in my room. They're not dead, so I use them. I keep one machine close to the current affordable edge, and the rest slide back into lessor demands. It's fun and cheaper than collecting old cars in the back yard.

Re:Home stuff

[woolio]

dump files into a PCI card when I want to transfer info.

Which PCI card would that be? The sound card???

My personal data center?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.365main.net/

Mostly Games

[cmarks03]

Here's my setup currently:
WRT54G serving as my router (stock firmware - only for hardware firewall duties).
Dell Powerconnect 3324 doing all the work
2 Linksys 5 port switches (one in the entertainment center, one in the bedroom)
P3 933 serving as my web server/sftp over ssh2 server/windows domain controller
Centrino laptop running Gentoo (almost)
Athlon 64 3700+ running XP Pro for games
Sempron 2500+ serving up my 700+ GB of files (no fancy RAID yet)
2 Xboxes (both modded)
1 PS2
1 Xbox 360
1 PSP

And all this for a single college student in a one bedroom apartment! The cold is never an issue in here...

This is the Most Boring Slashdot Topic Ever....

[Anonymous Coward]

.....I'm going back to the basement and play with my Wang.

There is...

[joliet convict]

...a certain person who has a full on data center in their basement including seperate power and HVAC. This person does testing for large network equipment vendors.

Post ACTUAL modest setups here...

[llamaluvr]

Dell Dimension 4100 1.1 GHz P3 512 MB 160 GB HDD slot-loading DVD player and red ATARI sticker running Windows Server 2003 - file/ ftp server, remote desktoping, jukebox, backup storage, plaything

Dell Latitude D600 1.3 GHz P-M 512 MB 40 GB HDD running Windows XP Pro - general purpose computer

IBM Thinkpad X40 1.2 GHz P-M 512 MB 40 GB HDD running Windows XP Pro - work-supplied computer

D-Link 4 port wireless-G router

Roommate runs his Gateway desktop and Compaq laptop on network, too.

I haven't spent much on computers yet, although I did invest in a Dell 20.1 inch LCD monitor, so at least it all looks good :-). It's nice because it has four video inputs- I hook the PS2 up to it and just play from my desk. I have a 1/8 inch stereo cable coming up from the desktop, which is hooked up to my 5.1 speakers, so I can hook it up to the laptop or to the PS2/NES/Dreamcast/whatever else is on the desk (w/ an adapter). My laptop will be over 3 years-old at the end of the year, so I'll prolly get a new one if there's money and Vista's out.

Re:Post ACTUAL modest setups here...

[Bad to the Ben]

Generic white-box 500MHz AMD K6-2 128MB RAM 8GB HDD running Debian 3.1.
- Basic WWW, mail, DNS and syslog server.

Self-assembled AMD XP2500+ 512MB RAM 40GB HDD running Ubuntu 5.10.
- Used to be my primary computer, now for people who come to visit, and for testing.

Self-assembled AMD Athlon64 3500+ 1024MB RAM 40GB + 80GB HDD running WinXP and Ubuntu 5.10 in dual-boot.
- My primary workstation.

Billion 7402 4 port ADSL router.

Dlink DI-524 wireless router (currently on the way back to Dlink to be repaired, only 2 months old :/ )

HP Ipaq Rx1950 PDA. Using this and the Dlink I can read Slashdot from my couch.

Don't have a Playstation or anything, but I do have an ancient SNES :D .

Many Unix Risc boxen

[delirium of disorder]

2 X Sgi o2 running IRIX
1 X Sgi Octane2 running IRIX
2 X HP PA-RISC machines running Debian
1 X Sun Ultra 20 running OpenBSD
1 X Compaq proliant (8 way SMP Xeon) running Debian
1 X Sun clone (4 way SMP UltraSPARCII) running Solaris
3 X x86 laptops used by various family members
3 X 10/100 hubs
1 X 10/100 switch
1 X D-link wifi access point
1 X Asus WL-HDD running Asus GNU/Linux
1 X Zipit running openzipit GNU/Linux
1 X KVM switch

And yes, this is set up in my parent's basement!

1 Laptop AMD 64 and 21" monitor

[linzeal]

I leave the work machines at work and school. If I didn't I would be in CAD all day and all night. Who else here dreams in CAD?

Although I do have some ATI 128 meg hardware video card I never use in this machine besides for games. Gametime is limited since I hit linear algebra but I hope to pickup the WOW expansion this summer.

I could have become a pasty bag of bits if I had kept some 5 odd computers I had before moving for grad school, but I like my cowboy hat, my laptop and my calculator doing homework outside when I can. Those computers weighed me down because I had so much attachement to where they were physically. Now I can throw my laptop and a few hard drives in a bag and call anywhere home.

I do have a stack of 5 external hard drives though. They conk out more often than the ones I used to have in an ATX case, any similiar experience?

5000 *real* machines

[Anonymous Coward]

5000 *real* machines. Mainly Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX...

Wait, you said "personal data center"? I do not think that means what you think it means.

Re:Queerest Ask Slashdot. Evar.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no replacement for displacement.

Mine

[syberanarchy]

Desktop: Athlon 64 @ 3200+ / X800XT / 2gb ram / 620GB HD Space (2x250 gb media drives, 120gb system drive)

Laptop: 1.8 ghz Celeron / 1gb ram / 80gb HD / Mobile Radeon 9700 (128mb)

Backup drive for media: 500 gb Lacie external disk

Video editing disk: 300 gb Maxtor one-touch

Home theater is a 50in. Hitachi LCD projection TV with a Onyko sound system. A modded Xbox is set up to work with the video on my desktop, plus I have a Xbox 360 and a HD DVR box.

All this is powered by a Linksys wireless router with firewall. I keep the wifi open and only share things over the network that I don't mind people copying. If you want to "borrow" those firefly rips, be my guest ;)

It's the machines, per se

[virusjan]

Because admittedly, I don't have many (3 servers up and running a Linux distro and a few desktops and laptops). But I do have a gig of bandwidth thanks to the lovely folks at Paxio.net who run fiber to our homes.

Sure, why not

[Sentry21]

I'm bored, it's late, what the heck....

Our DSL is 3 meg down, 800k up, with eight static IPs and reverse DNS control. That plugs into a Cisco 720 DSL modem with 32 megs of ram, which runs the latest IOS. This modem handles DHCP (which I'm going to disable in favour of setting up a network management server) and also manages an IPv6 tunnel (also with reverse DNS control).

From there, it goes to our Cisco Micro Switch 10/100 (old kit I guess), which routes it off to the various machines. The first is my roommate's AMD64 desktop system; next is the dual-proc Ultra2, which is my testing ground, and my roommate's CVS server; after that is the 1.3 GHz Celeron which serves as our media centre PC and runs MCE.

I've recently begun playing with a Bondi Blue iMac which I got from a client, putting Ubuntu on it (on 96 megs of ram, it's painful), which required taking the network cable away from my roommate's new Dell laptop running Debian. He found another one, but I need to find a replacement cable for the old Ultra5 (thinking about putting OopenSolaris 10 on it, the poor thing).

Finally, another cable runs to my (crappy) wireless router, which serves out wireless to my shiny 12" Powerbook.

We have the dubious distinction of being the only geek residence out of anyone I know which does not posess two machines on the same arch which run the same OS. Great for experimentation, pain in the ass if you want to make use of distcc.

Oh, and no, we don't have enough IP addresses for all the machines. Kind of tragic. I'm thinking about setting the 'experimentation' machines to 10.0.0.x addresses and letting them keep public IPv6 addresses. Hmm...

Re:Sure, why not

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay.... here goes...
6Mbps x 768Kbps DSL... Sorry, it's just too late to type out everything...
Main Box: Intel 2.8E GHz, 2GB DDR400, 1TB Storage
Web Server: Dell PowerEdge 6400, 5x18GB SCSI, 2x700MHz Xeon 2MB Cache, 4GB RAM
                        Hosting 8 websites and doing security monitoring
Firewall-A: Protects my Internal Network
Firewall-B: Protects my Wireless Network
Firewall-C: Protects my Web Server
House Heater: Dell PowerEdge 6300, 6x9GB SCSI, 4x400MHz Xeon 1MB Cache, 2GB RAM
TiVo: SE
Laptop: For reading Slash.dot late at night
9x misc computer sitting in the corner, dual procs, etc.
1x 10/100 5-Port Hub (ran out of switches)
1x 10/100 16-Port Hub (not currently used)
1x 4-port VPN Server (using it as a 4 Port Switch currently)
2x 10/100 16-Port Switch
1x 10/100/1000 24 Port GigE Switch
CAT5 Crimper and a box of cable

and lastly... to take their mind off of my datacenter... 8 inches...

Tech Sizing....

[chmod]

OK, I'll 'bite' Here's what I've got swingin'

6M/768K 8Static, Speakeasy

1x 1.25Ghz Powerbook, Latest OS/X
1x 1Ghz Inspiron P3, XP Pro
1x AMD 3200+ Tbird MCE Dual ATSC tuners, 2x NEC 17" 1280x1024x8ms LCD
1x dual P3-1Ghz Centos 4.2
1x dual P3-500Mhz Centos 4.2
1x XEN domain (Offsite, out of state, mx, dns secondary, etc..)

2x WRT54G 1 WPA/AES Private, 1 Public/DMZ

1x Synology DS-101G+ NAS 300G SATA int
& 1x 300G eSATA & 2x Maxstor II 300G

1x HP Photosmart 8250 Printer

1x Hacked Xbox (250G)
1x Xbox 360
1x Comcast DVR
1x Tivo
1x Mitsubishi 1920x1080x8ms 37" LCD

Lots of good fun!

yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

unfortunately, you're connecting to the internet through a 2400 baud dial-up, because you're able to achieve such a high degree of compression with all that hardware, right? :).

Costly!

[cerberusss]

Think about how much juice these things suck when you leave them on 24x7... Then tell the wife. Then see your uptime plummet.

I prefer silence

[dimss]

1x Motorola DOCSIS modem.
1x Asus WL-500G Deluxe access point running OpenWRT. This one provides me with WiFi, NAT, firewall, FTP (vsftpd) and WWW (lighttpd). Here it is: http://dimss.homeunix.org/010about.html
1x HP nx9020 laptop. Turned off most of the time.
1x Sagem myX5-2 cellphone.

Someday I will move to a large house. There will be real 19-inch box somewhere in basement.

My mate Paul must have some serious issues...

[leonbrooks]

...since he has a DecSystem-10 mainframe at home. Not much on raw compute power, but big on cubage and power consumption (how many of us have a three-phase plug in our loungerooms?) and it does play StarTrek (on a DecWriter LA-36, if you please, but normally VT-220s).

One of the many huge power-supply caps has enough juice to keep my laptop running for about fifteen minutes.

My own home "network" consists of a do-everything Linux server (2.4GHz Duron, 2G RAM, 160GB IDE HDD, Mandriva 2006.0) which doubles as a workstation, another (Dual PentiumPro 200, 196MB RAM, 40GB IDE HDD, Mandriva 2005LE) which is effectively a CD burning jukebox (mostly Linux distributions, TheOpenCD and a couple of the free Baen's Books CDs), a NetGear DG-834G wireless ADSL router/switch, a Kingston 8-port 10/100 switch, a Duron 800, 256MB, 80GB for the kids' games (wireless, Mandriva 2005LE) two wireless laptops (one old AOpen 2.4GHz Pentium-M, 512MB, 40GB, Mandriva 2006.0, one new Durabook R15D 2.6GHz Centrino, 1GB, 60GB, Mandriva 2006.0/WinXP dual boot, which I keep dual mainly for customer support and for editing on long trips -- the ACPI is completely broken, and TwinHead've only patched it for XP), one customer server (Athlon64-3GHz, 1GB, 2x200GB, Mandriva 2006.0), one "thrash box" (Athlon 1800, 512MB, 80GB, Ubuntu 5.10) and occasionally other stuff.

I'd like to say that it's neatly arranged in a rack and so forth but that would be a blatant lie, there's stuff scattered all over the place, basically wherever it will fit within reach of the appropriate cables.

The main workstation is about to lose its 19" CRT in favour of two 17" flatscreens. I'd actually spring for 2x19" flatscreens if resolution higher than 1280x1024 was available without the loss of an arm or leg.

Evidently,

[leonbrooks]

they write software.

~20ghz home based redundant hydro bills

[ali3nxx]

My house sounds like the local airport hehe... Here's a basic rundown on our home network I use for a global scale home based consulting and network systems engineering services business. I've included hostnames for each of the servers.

1x smp 246 opteron anvil 2GB ecc ddr3200 crucial Tyan 2882-D 2U RM214 Chenbro, 400gb sata Hardened Selinux Gentoo; ldap-pk, mysql
1x smp 246 opteron hammer 2GB ecc ddr3200 crucial Tyan 2882-D 2U RM214 Chenbro, 400gb sata Hardened Gentoo hosting five GSX server virtual hosts. Solaris10, netbsd, openbsd, win2k3 ent, winxp. xdmcp term serv
1x 3200 venice core amd64 1.1TB sata midas 1GB DDR3200 CM-WaveMaster a8n-e 19" Samsung Syncmaster amd64 Gentoo Linux
1x 1900 athlon-xp mage winxp general purpose, 20gb 512MB Corsair DDR3200 "family PC"
1x smp 933 pentium3 w/ 18gb raid0 u160 scsi p4k1tst0rm; ldap-pk postfix apache2, Hardended Gentoo Linux
1x pentium4 120gb 690MB ram, horace; Hardened Gentoo GSX Server host w/ 2 guests, madwifi-ng kismet server/ hostapd wap1
1x 900 athlon-tbird 512MB ram, gateway 40gb seagate, mysql, ldap-pk, samba, acid, cacti, uptime 200+ days
1x 700 pentium3 60gb seagate 512MB pc133 demon; squid, nagios, cfengine, snort
1x p2 400 256MB sd133 2.6 hardened openmosix image development
1x p2 233 10gb 384MB sd100 tank madwifi-ng kismet server/ hostapd wap1, Selinux Hardened Gentoo
1x p2 266 10gb 256MB sd100 cannon 2.4 openmosix image development
1x pentium166 2.4 openmosix image development 60MB edo
1x HP PSC 1350 samba shared network printer/scanner
6' two post aluminum bline cooper rackmount
1x 1000 watt 4U UPC SmartUPS redundant rackmount PSU
1x 5500 Cisco catalyst switch with new sup3 CatOs 6.4, fa 10/100 blade, smf and mmf fiber blades dual redundant psu's
1x 2924-XL Cisco switch
1x 2924-M Cisco switch
2x 2514 Cisco routers
1x 3620 Cisco Router, 20MB pcmcia card, previous owner famous ccie/cisco press author
1x 2610XM Cisco router adventipserv 12.3 ios
1x 2620XM Cisco router adventipserv 12.3 ios
1x 2511-RJ Cisco Term router
2x 2504 Cisco isdn/token ring routers
5x 2501 Cisco routers
1x 400 Fasthub Cisco hub
1x 1000 ft roll of bargain cat5e :)
1x nerves of steel
0x free/spare time hehe

Many have inquired why we would use nothing but Gentoo linux for host servers. Ultimate in agility, consistancy and prepetuility over the lifetime of our critical systems.

Power Conservation Anyone?

[geekyMD]

Here comes the Flamebait mod, but it had to be said:

I for one certainly hope, that with all the anti-bush, war for oil, anti-SUV, and general conservationist rhetoric present on this forum, that those same people aren't the ones with the enormous data centers.

Personally, I just have 2 laptops, a linux box, and a old PC. Nothing fancy, just enough to toy with, and most sit on the shelf most of the time. I think its insane the amount of money people are willing to pour into this hobby. But of course, each to their own, and I guess it can be easily be called job training.

But of course, if you feel that the Iraq war is blood for oil (I don't), I hope you're realizing you're pouring that blood into your personal data centers. (sorry sorry, but I just know there are people out there who hate waste and then leave 4 computers on constantly, and those people really bug me)

Re:Power Conservation Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US power is mainly generated with coal, which is sourced within the US.

Not oil.

HTH

Re:Power Conservation Anyone?

[t-maxx cowboy]

Power conservation is something valid. On another point of yours, about how much money some people throw into the hobby. I know people that the only extra money they throw into the hobby is for their power consumption. Many of the IT workers out there, get the old equipment from their customers, because there is no internal use for it.

Virtualisation.

[Anonymous Coward]

In total, I have five computers running: My PC, server, router, family laptop and Sister's PC (malwaremagnet). Of these, until recently the server, router and my PC remained on constantly.

With the release of VMWare Server ive been experimenting with virtualisation as a way to reduce my considerable power usage. The server (running Ubuntu linux) is now also host to a win2k guest system. With that running p2p, the podcast downloader and IRC client I can turn the main PC off. When more memory arrives, the router will be consolidated in the same way (Smoothwall is a usful tool).

Other power-saving measures: I have a switch under the desk that turns off power to the three monitors whenever I leave the room (Or someone interupts me). The router runs off a compactflash card with a CF-to-IDE adaptor. The router is remaining in place after consolidation, for redundency - just not turned on.

2 good for nothing nameless PCs

[rammer]

The subject says it all. That's my whole home setup.
No DSL.
No WLAN.
No modem.

What the home does have is:
Two kids. (soon to be 3 & 4)
A wife.

Those three take all of the little time & most of the money I have.
The little money that is left is saved for house of our own.
And there is no home setup that could be better than those three.

Re:Why the hell do you need a personal data centre

[muhgcee]

You surely don't have shitloads of stuff with that kind of storage...

That would be just enough for the music collection, OS, and games of the average person posting on here. So we're not even talking about movies, ISO images, etcetera.

I obviosuly need more kit.

[Anonymous Coward]

1 x Soekris 4801-50 with 7 Ethernet Ports running OpenBSD on a 512MB CF. This is the main firewall. always on.

1 x 3Com 54G Wireless access point. always on.

1 x 17" Apple PowerBook. Main work machine running Tiger. Always on, 24x7

1 x IBM/Lenovo T43 running XP (wife's machine)

1 x Cisco 2900XL Enterprise Switch providing 24 10/100 ports. Alwats on 24x7

1 x half-height rack

1 x SGI Octane2, 400MHz, 1GB RAM, 18GB Disk with 18" Iiyama TFT and external SCSI CD-ROM, runs IRIX 6.5.28. A true thing of beauty and possibly the greatest computer I have ever used.

2 x Compaq D5S Small Form Factor machines, each with 512MB RAM and 400GB Hard disks. Releatively low power consumption. They both run OpenBSD-STABLE. Host my websites & file shares and they synchronise master->backup every night. One has a DDS4, the other has DVD-RW. I take backups every week, and also encrypt specific subset of files and copy to remote file host every night.

1 x Shuttle SB75G2 with 3GHz P4, 1GB RAM and 72GB Raptor disk. Runs OpenBSD-STABLE. Database dev system, but soon to be re-tasked.

4 x various cisco routers with cables (can't be bothered to type the specs). These are only ever switched on when I am working on Cisco specific stuff for clients.

1 x Sun E250 Server with 3 x 9GB Disks and 2 x 450MHz running Solaris 10. Almost always switched off.

10 x SparcStation 20. Bought in a pallet lot from an office clearance. Each running a variety of OpenBSD or NetBSD, all of which are for testing purposes or development and rarely switched on. Built like tanks but a now becoming a pain in the arse. Will probably go in bulk at the next car boot sale.

Next purchases will be a proper disk array and gigabit upgrades for all systems.

all sorts of negative...

[MOMOCROME]

here now.

I want to say right off the bat, I've had several girlfriends in the past and am working on a first kid with my beautiful wife. In other words, I've matriculated from the heady days of proving my virility. I'm not in the slightest worried about how large my reproductive organs are perceived.

This is not to say that I disparage the urge to crow about such things. I feel that it is a fundamental part of reproductive behavior. Nothing to be ashamed about. You got to advertise and strut your stuff if you are going to ever satisfy the primordial demands of producing progeny. You should, however, be ashamed of nocturnal emissions. yuck.

Likewise, I feel there is nothing to be ashamed of in enumerating your hardware on a web forum. Consider: we are all enthusiasts of computing machinery, otherwise we'd hardly be reading slashdot. What exactly is the problem with discussing the status quo among enthusiasts from time to time? The pressure to appear humble about this topic, for what appears to be concern over sexual insecurity, is a needless and ultimately, pointless peer-induced form of community repression. I think it is pretty sad.

And so I say, don't listen to the uptight wankers decrying the pursuit of enthusiasm. Embrace your geekiness, and share it with the rest of us. I'd like to know what unique and/or bizarre things people are up to in this crazy time of surplus server gear and commonplace broadband.

oh great...

[maxpublic]

...a geek dick-measuring contest. Guys, it should've dawned on you by now that constructing elaborate home networks to compensate for a small penis size WILL NOT get you chicks. The jocks had it right from the start; spend all that money on a nice car and a few tailored suits, and you're far, far more likely to get laid by something other than a RealDoll, tiny penis or no.

But seriously, I'd be much more interested to see what people had on their computers, and how much of that stuff they had. As in, "just how many gigs of porn do you have?" or "what the fuck is up with you torrenting all those Gilligan's Island episodes?"

Me, I collect photos off the internet and turn them into wallpapers, which I run by category on eight separate desktops via the KDE pager. The collection, although not Guiness World Record making by any stretch, now stands at well over 10 gigs of high-quality or ultra-high quality photos, with about 40% of those photos having been converted into wallpapers (more than 10,000 cycling between the eight desktops). I know, a pretty fucking boring hobby, but one I enjoy and I've never run into anyone with a larger personal collection (obsession).

This is the kind of thing I'd find of interest. I'd "Ask Slashdot" but I've pissed off the monkeys, er, editors one too many times and couldn't get a fucking presidential assassination link greenlighted at this point.

Max

This is the way to go

[wetfeetl33t]

1. Get 1 machine
2. Install xen
3. Set up as many domains on it as you want
4. Claim you have that many individual machines running, instead of just 1
5. ????
6. Profit!

You know, the funny thing is...

[tgd]

The funny thing is, if a guy was interviewing with me for an IT position and said he ran a setup at home like that, he'd be round-filed. What a massive waste of electricity and resources. The functions he has listed can be easily met with two or three machines and its either massive intarweb dick-waving or a real lack of understanding about how IT services can or should be deployed when it takes twelve.

Example: I run my Linux fileserver, my Windows MCE 2005 system for my XBox 360s, another Windows system running some home automation package I can't remember, and my general "this is internet accessible for ssh" Linux system on one piece of hardware, a relatively energy efficient dual Pentium III system with a load of RAM running VMWare and a bunch of external firewire drives. One server, a gigabit switch, a 10/100 switch and my DLink router. Enough to meet everything he was doing, and my electric bill isn't $100/month from it.

I may actually add "describe your home network setup" to my list of interview questions. I'd never thought of it, and it tells you a lot about people, it seems.

Re:You know, the funny thing is...

[lukewarmfusion]

I think it comes from having extra machines. Note that the guy has four extra computers lying around waiting for a purpose. I have three or four unused machines in the basement. I hate to throw them away - so I might end up using them for some side project like setting up Asterisk or an extra development web server. Sure, I could combine a bunch of boxes to do all of these things on one, but then I'd let that Pentium II powerhouse go to waste.

Re:You know, the funny thing is...

[oni]

I don't think you get it. I'm not a client. I didn't sit down with a set of requirements for my home network and then go purchase the most cost-effective solution. I buy stuff because I'm a geek and I like to play with technology. Then later I use what I already have for something practical (my home network).

Saying, "I wouldn't hire a person with a home network like that" is like saying, "I'm hiring for the Discovery Channel's _Monster Garage_ and I would never hire a guy with a tricked out Harley. He should know that all he needs to drive to work is a minivan."

Re:You know, the funny thing is...

[corvair2k1]

then I'd let that Pentium II powerhouse go to waste.

I laughed. :)

Anyway, I think I've come up with a pretty decent manner to do these things. At any time, I only have three desktops and two laptops. Desktops: One acts as an SSH gateway/webserver with the "important" software, another is a play Linux box (for testing things out, general use, sits under my desk), and the third is the Windows machine for games (sits under my desk). These machines were made in chronological order; that is, the workhorse Linux machine is the oldest, the play linux box is the middle child, and the Windows box is the newest. When I buy a new box, it's the new Windows machine, and the other machines get bumped down, and the oldest machine goes to someone else who wants it.

The downside of that is my roommate always wants the oldest machine. Therefore, I'm not spending a dime less on electricity because he's running four machines in in his bedroom. But at least it cuts down on how much I have to manage personally.

Oh... And the laptops are around because it's' simply a shame to get rid of a laptop. But this is when you ask yourself, why have two laptops that run Windows? I've got the powerbook, but sometimes it's just handy to have some Windows that can move around.

Re:You know, the funny thing is...

[ptudor]

I may actually add "describe your home network setup" to my list of interview questions. I'd never thought of it, and it tells you a lot about people, it seems.

You definitely should... I find the answers to be quite interesting and a look into whether someone is a 9-5 geek or a 24x7 nerd. If the UNIX admin doesn't have an old Ultra sitting around or a NetEng has a WRT54G but hasn't installed OpenWRT/sveasoft/etc I start wondering...

And to be on topic, my home setup has two old P3s and a Mac... OpenBSD at the edge for IPsec and IPv6 and Gentoo for MythTV. I was using a first-gen 12" PowerBook until I broke it recently, now I'm using an Intel iMac and love having a 3250x1200 desktop instead of 1024x768 but the lack of portability sucks.

Oh, and for wireless, there's the an Airport Express for the stereo, an old Netgear for 802.11b, a D-Link for 802.11g, and a Linksys the employer just gave me. Don't try to use channels 1, 6, or 11 around my place.

I guess I should mention the phone has an IP address too.

Re:You know, the funny thing is...

[fuzza]

I may actually add "describe your home network setup" to my list of interview questions. I'd never thought of it, and it tells you a lot about people, it seems.

The Network Admin position I was interviewed for just yesterday had it (well, "draw").

Re:You know, the funny thing is...

[Horus1664]

I don't know about the poster but I live with a few other people, a wife who's an osteopath, working from home and two teenage kids (one of each). This means that my 'home setup' does need to be more than a single box running VMWare (handy though VMWare is)

Having a working machine each is essential (i.e. 4 x PCs) since teenagers don't seem to be able to function without constant access to some form of instant messaging and/or MMORPGs and/or Limewire etc.

Being able to share other resources such as printers, scanners, storage etc. can introduce more hardware. I also have various switches, KVMs, WAPs etc.

The simple facts are that although currently we put this sort of environment together ourselves at the moment this sort of thing will be built-in in future apartments and houses. The best bet for reduced energy consumption is lower power devices, improved buildings, better use of renewable sources and all the other commonly quoted ideas. I'm afraid the technological genie is out of the bottle and I don't see a reduction in the use of devices or facilities within my lifetime (or the lifetime of my two teenegers either).

Perhaps the poster should modify his ideas about classifying people like me without asking a few more questions, should I ever wash up in front of him for an interview....

Re:You know, the funny thing is...

[Tweekster]

You do realize the 9 to 5 geek is many times preferred to a 24x7 nerd. Simple, communication skills. Nerds dont have them, the person that likes to do non geek stuff will.

Just great...

[tgd]

Crap, now I feel like a total loser. Not only do I only have one computer in my home data center and only one client, my car is a tiny little 2000lbs and only 2 liter.

I suck.

Re:Just great...

[Tower]

Ah, but if that were the Elise, that would be one fantastic 2000lb, sub-2liter auto.

Really, though, Many 1.8/2L engines now are among the best in terms of power/economy tradeoffs (it is a wonder what a small turbo can do)... >30MPG, ~200HP, and not too much weight to screw with handling.

Re:Just great...

[drinkypoo]

Over time, I think I've owned machines totalling far more than 2000 lb in weight. Then again, my current car is 3500 lb, and I'm pretty sure I've owned more than 3500 lb of computers, too. I mean, just the stuff I owned in TX added up, and I was only there for a little more than a year and a half. I had three or four PCs in that time, as well as an Indigo R3000, four IBM RT/PC model 135s which I gave to a coworker, and five or so Apollo DN3000 and DN4000 systems, which I gave to the dumpster, there not being much demand for 68k-based Unixlike systems with ESDI hard drives and quarter-inch tape drives. I've owned at least fifteen or twenty PCs, a Sun 3/260 I upgraded to a 4/260, an AlphaStation 3000/300X, I've still got an Indy, I've had about six or seven 68k macs and one Bondi Blue G3 with the old and crappy CMD IDE controller, five Amigas, an Apple ][+, a C= 16, and loads of other computers I've blocked out of my mind.

None of this stuff was state-of-the-art when I bought it. Quite a bit of it was used. All of it was heavier than newer and faster competition :)

My Setup

[Cros13]

1 x Thrown together desktop, 1gig RAM, 2.8Ghz Northwood P4, The most unstable system on the planet
1 x Toshiba P20 Laptop, 1gig RAM, 3.06GHz P4, Paid 7500 Euro for it several years ago
3 x DNUK Dual Xeon Nocona Servers 16gigs RAM, 3ware 9500-8 SATA RAID, 1.6TB RAID 5, Debian/Suse
1 x 4x 8Core Ultrasparc T1, 32Gig RAM, On Loan Sun Server(Thanks Sun!)
1 x Venerable 3Com ISDN Router I've repurposed as a simple webserver
1 x Netgear WRT54G Router
1 x DLink 32 Port Gigabit Switch
1 x Cisco 2600 Router
1 x Toshiba Satellite 750Mhz PIII 384 Meg RAM, running FC4 and mirroring wikipedia

And thanks to my wonderful telco Eircom(B*ST*RDS!!!) who want to charge me 2000 Euro a month for a 512K, I have no net connection, and last time I had a modem charged me 1200 euro a month for 56K that tended to give generally 1KB/sec in addition to the hefty monthly charge to get a "cheap" dialup number. They only rolled out DSL to 20% of the population, at almost 100 euro a month for a 2 meg line with a 1gig(wtf?) download limit, and now they've slowed down the big rollout due to "lack of demand". What's worse is they wholesale this crappy service to EVERY other telco. I've been waiting 15 years to get a half way decent net connection... instead I have to commute 50 miles to impose on a friend who's stupid and rich enough to pay the 2000 euro........

Excuse me I must now go vomit.......

They just had to ask...

[Octorian]

For details, look here.

In the rack:
- Cable modem
- Cisco 4500M+ router
- 1U Netfinity 4000R (650MHz P3) firewall, FreeBSD 6
- Intel NetStructure 470F switch (8 x 1000Base-SX)
- BayStack 450-24T switch (24 x 100Base-TX, 1 x 1000Base-SX)
- Sun Netra T1 105 (360MHz US2i) auth/util server, Solaris 10
- Sun Blade 1000 (2x900MHz US3) e-mail/SunRay/etc. server, Sol 10
- Custom-built 4U PC box (2x600MHz P3) file server, FreeBSD 6
- 3 x APC Smart-UPS (2200, 1400, 700)
- Lightwave ConsoleServer 800 (serial console server)
- Some Dell whizbanger I'm co-lo'ing for a friend.

Oh, and that's just on the 19" equipment rack. I've got a SuSE 10 Linux desktop (Athlon64) on the desk near by, a fiber run across the attic to another 450-24T in my wiring closet (which in turn links to jacks all over my house), Sun Ray thin clients in several rooms, laptops (of course), a network-attached laser printer, etc, etc. It feels pointless to inventory every trinket bought in an afternoon at Best Buy like the parent of this discussion, honestly. I've already only mentioned a subset, and havn't even touched on the stuff I'm not presently using.

my setup

[Optic]

1x Wireless router thingy.
1x iBook 700MHz.

I get enough data center at work, I certainly don't need it at home!

I gave away all of my old computer junk instead of trying to make a network out of it, and my life has improved!

I'm actually trying to cut back...

[baptiste]

My small data center started with an AMD K6-2 300Mhz server back in 1998. My local ISP loves me and I have a 1MBps symetric DSL line, friendly TOS, and 5 public IPs. As my friends and I hosted more websites, I added a 1GHz Athlon server with 18GB SCSI Mirror and 60GB IDE mirror using 3Ware cards. Two friends setup their own servers as well (vanilla Intel based boxen with mirrored drives). The noise was pretty intense and I started to notice a significant hit on the 'ol electric bill.

The servers lived on a 'RedLAN' protected initially by a Nortel IIS400 firewall and then by 3 NetGear RT311 firewalls, with a fourth for the GreenLAN. When the RT311s started to get DDoSed with kiddies exhausting their tiny NAT tables, we 'upgraded' to an old NORTEL Contivity 1500 firewall (so we could VPN into the RedLAN) while the GreenLAN moved behind a NetGear FVS318. Add to that probably 4 white box desktops and a laptop on the GreenLAN.

Needless to say, the noise, heat load, and cost of electricity started to become an issue. So when we built a new garage with a large heated space above it, I decided it was time to consolidate my network. So here's what I've got now - much happier

The garage office is the main network point. The 4 servers have been consolidated down to 2 and hopefully soon 1. The one server is a dual Opteron server (Tyan S2882 mobo) running Linux VServer (I think there are 12) Right now it only has 250GB of storage, but has an SATA drive cage with 5 slots that I likely will use to expand to 1TB. The RedLAN and GreenLAN firewalls were consolidated with a D-Link DFL-700 firewall (which was able to do port redirection to multiple internal IPs - a requirement for the migration of services) My friends and I host approximately 123 domains with varying amounts of service on each. The RedLAN stays in the garage currently. the GreenLAN goes underground to the house over a 150m fiber. I have 3 WRT54G access points running DD-WRT firmware providing wireless throughout the property (we have 7.5 acres) Network backbone is a mix of NetGear and D-Link switches. Env monitoring is done via an old APC unit (works nicely) The 1GHz Athlon is now a desktop for the kids. I use an AMD64 Shuttle SN95G (love it!) and my wife uses a new Compaq Presario V2414 laptop. Printing is done via an HP4000DN and a Zerba 2746e label printer (with NetGear PS101 print server) for a small business I have. I also have various network connected home automation widgets. So the Static IP list is longer than you'd think.

The power feeding the servers and certain lights in the garage is hooked up to a generator standby switch. An exterior generator connection provides backup power in a pinch. The bulk of the servers and network gear are on a TrippLite 2200W UPS with additional battery pack. The last time the power went, it ran for close to two hours before running low.

Oh and our 5 phone lines (don't ask) are run on a Panasonic Digital Hybrid TD-1232 PBX system with integrated voice mail and voice response services.

The change in the electric bill has been significant! And the noise level in the office is way down. I've been very happy with the VServer setup.

For once I'm fairly content. The only improvements awaiting improved cash flow will be to piggyback the RedLAN onto the fiber along with the GreenLAN (and managed switches with VLAN capability are still kind of pricey) so I can install a Simpletech NAS250 or NAS400 box in the house for 'offsite' data replication. If the cash flow really improved, I'd probably setup a very low power 'standby' server that could keep critical services up and running in the event of a serious hardware failure on the main server. And would love to build a Mini-ITX MythTV setup. But the kids gotta eat!

So I'm bucking the trend and cutting back/consolidating.

some of you kids have quite the budget for toys

[museumpeace]

but did you design your house so you could drop cat5 or coax anywhere, anytime [or 110/60hz for that matter]. I did.

1. vertical utility shaft carries power, coax and cat5 connecting 3 floors.
2. ethernet hubs at each floor
3. post & beam frame elments have built-in chaseways to handle horizontal distribution. The house is 25 years old and the wiring has had a steady progression of upgrades without fishing wires or drilling holes in things.
4. Whole house 8000watt back-up generator.
5. separate breakers for study and other rooms [4 so far but there is a request for a "recipe book computer and pantry inventory system" in the kitchen] that require "rich infrastructure".

you also should answer this question: is it just your hobby or do you have to share the house resources with other computerliterate and demanding users. I have to keep my firewall machine [an ancient win2k sytem about be replaced by a small linksys firewall/router box] utterly up to date and maintain VPN capability for my wife's telecommuting. When Junior is home from college there is wireless subnetted from his bedroom drop...and we used to have to negotiate fileswapping schedules because his little operation [he had the hotrod system two-up display for music studio work ]could suck up all our cable bandwidth.

. So, on any given day that all the kids are home from college, the netowrks might be loaded up like this:

• 500mhz pentium win2k firewall machine [sygate, sometimes ZA]
• 3x 5-port ethernet hubs
• Linksys wireless router with a few clients
• 2.4ghz athlon custom box, XP [audigy II sound and 5.1 sound system]
• thinkpad
• HP vectra [
• two lexmark inkjets
• floating 750 USB zip drive [fileshares are iffy in a network where the boxes come and go, junior changes the network names to suit his wim and MS patches its security bugs behind your back.]
• floating 80gig USB external HD
• Optionally, a 500 mhz AMD box [it was once a CompUSA product but now more of a frankenbox] booting up either Solaris or some slightly less than up to date RedHat flavored Linux]
• iMac
• iBook
• hp inkjet
• home theater machine: junior's selection of components from NewEgg, half a terabyte for the ATI All-In-Wonder to scribble TV shows onto..[.damned if I will pay a monthly fee just to let some marketing co know what I watch.]Small [200w?] 7.1 sound system. scanner, wirless interfaces, this is where we load up thumbdrives with mp3's taken off-air. still shoping for the right 30" monitor.
• Juniors decrepit presario chewing gum holds the power connector in, theres a nylon wire tie jammed into the pcmcia slot...I don't ask.
• Juniors muscular new presario with extralife battery.

and the garage has a pile of monitors and older PC's in varios states of disrepair, most are organ donors and destined for the dump except for the fax machines that I still haven't found the right drivers or network interfaces.
off all the pictures I could put illustrating this managerie, the rats nest of power cords, ethernet, USB cables and peripheral power supplies and powerstrips where all this connectivity lands on my desk is the most ammusing.
One other thing. Junior knows how to put passwords on things and the house is about 100yards from the road so no wardriving here...but our neigbors are bit sloppier so we have access to more network than we maintain. But I don't think its ethical to list their stuff in my inventory. ;)

1.2TB Server and MANY photos

[coolnicks]

I have:

1x 1.2 TB server, doing DNS, DHCP, NAT etc
2x fast desktops with dual screens
2x dell power connect 48port switches
1x 5port gigabit switch
28x various PII/PIII servers
4x DUAL PIII servers
1x 8port KVM
1x crappy printer
1x surround sound
Pictures here :

Current Desktop http://www.nickdell.co.uk/photos/desktop.jpg
1.TB Web/File server http://www.nickdell.co.uk/photos/server.jpg
Dell Powerconnects http://www.nickdell.co.uk/photos/dellpowerconnect. jpg
Development Rig http://www.nickdell.co.uk/photos/test_rig.jpg

Others:

Main Machine http://www.nickdell.co.uk/photos/mainmachine.jpg
Secondary Machine http://www.nickdell.co.uk/photos/secondarymachine. jpg
Patch Cabinet http://www.nickdell.co.uk/photos/patch_cab.jpg

Terabytes

[tsa]

Here at work I have a group of around 20 people. We are happy with our 120 GB network disk that contains all our data (and is backed up regularly). At home I have around 2.5 GB of data I backup regularly. I always wonder how in the world people need a Terabyte or more just for their own data? How the hell can you fill that amount of space with `legal' data?

Re:Terabytes

[t-maxx cowboy]

I am not yet in to the Terabyte range myself either, but I can tell you this. If you edit home videos, from your miniDV camcorder, or any analog video recorder, through a capture card, you can run up your space usage very quickly.

Additionally, fair use, of my music CD collection and of my movie collections, within my own house, from my own, legally acquired CD's and DVD's is not illegal. It all depends on your bit rate, but it can add up quickly, even if you are just making your music available for playing. Especially if you use a lossless codec.

I'm not quite in this league...

[dschuetz]

...but I'll describe mine just the same.

• Server: Dell Dual 3G Xeon with 500 GB RAID 5
  
• Webserver: 700 MHz athlon (movinng to 2.8G P4 Dell)
  
• Backup server: 1.6G Athlon (moving to 2.4G P4, 200G RAID 5 Dell)
  
• Desktops: 2 Mac Mini, 1 G4 iMac
  
• Music players: 4 networked Rio/Dell MP3 players (running custom firmware / server)
  
• iPod: 60G color, 30G video
  
• TiVo: 2 hacked/networked DirecTV TiVos (plus another Series 1 unhacked and an unhacked HDTV TiVo)
  
• Firewall: Soekris 5-port hardware, with 8MB flash running M0n0wall

For my main switch I'm using a Cisco something-24 (3724? I forget). Will replace that with a cheap-o Gigabit switch sometime soon.

(I've also got all kinds of old PCs, mostly from relatives, that I should either do something with or throw away, plus an old 133 MHz Toshiba laptop that was crap even when I bought it, and of course the laptop from work that I never use. Also a 1.8G Athlon that will eventually become a dual-screen linux workstation a hacked iOpener that never could keep its ethernet running, and, oh yeah, two NeXT computers: A turbo color slab and a 68030 cube).

Re:Queerest Ask Slashdot. Evar.

[Phreakiture]

This is the equivalent of either a dick-size or old-school engine displacement war. Its nothing than more Slashdot navel-gazing, about how über we all are, vs. the unwashed masses, with a subtle MS bash thrown in.

Instead of a "what trinkets do you have?" Ask Slashdot, how about a "Whats needed in a home lab?" Ask Slashdot question? Otherwise it degenerates into a wallet-size competition, or an obscure "my firmware version on my Linksys is better than yours because Fry's is teh suck, CompUSA is teh r0XX0r!" discussion.

Sort of true, but not completely.

It's not really the trinkets that are interesting, so much as it is what you do with them.

To drive my point home, suppose I tell you that I have six machines on my home network, and list off the hardware. Have I told you anything useful? No, not really.

OTOH, if I tell you that these machines are: A firewall/web server/NAT router, A file/database server, a workstation for me, a workstation for the wife (yes, I actually do have one), a server to tinker with, and my company-issued laptop computer, then maybe I've told you something useful -- that I can set up a network

If I tell you that I use 100% wired networking because it is faster and more secure than wireless, then I have told you something -- that I care about performance.

If I tell you about the unique solution I concocted for the power starvation problems in my file server and workstation, then I have told you something -- that can (a) use a soldering iron, (b) design a circuit and (c) etch a PC board, all without outside assistance.

If I tell you about the high ratio of recycled equipment in my network, then I have told you something -- that I don't believe you have to have the latest, greatest, fastest thing out there.

If I tell you what I use for motherboards in my workstation and file server (Via MII-12000), then I have told you something -- that I value energy efficiency and compactness over speed.

If, on the other hand, I tell you about my processor speeds, ram sizes, HDD sizes, and the shiny Morex chasses, then all I have told you about is what I can afford, and I might as well be quoting penile dimensions as you suggest.

Nothing new

[JoeCommodore]

In apartment, running or can be in a moments notice.

Commodore PET 4032 (at present, 10 others in storage) w/SFD 1001 and 2031LP
Commodore 64w/SuperCPU, RR-Net Ethernet and CMD Hard Drive
Commodore 128 w/RAMLink and Hard Drive
Commodore 138D
Commodore SX 64
Commodore B128
Commoeore P500
Strawberry iMac (wife's)
Blue & White Mac G3
No Name P4 w/ubuntu
No Name AMD Ath 1600+ w/ubuntu
No Name budget Cyrix box (? OS)
Commodore 286 Laptop
DSL with Netgear stuff and sufficient wiring

NSLU2, tummy

[coyote-san]

Get a $100 NSLU2 and wipe its brain. Extremely small, extremely quiet, extremely low power and no worries that you'll come home and discover that your power supply has started a fire. You probably don't even need to worry about it being stolen since you can tuck it out of sight. Very out of sight if you use a wireless connection.

BTW I was running my servers at home but had the same problems mentioned elsewhere. Plus the growing problem of my email being rejected since it came from a block of residential IP addresses, and old hardware that I was increasingly uncomfortable leaving up unattended. I eventually said "screw it" and got a cheap virtual hosting system at Tummy. For $25/month I get reliable service and can run the apps of my choice.

Re:NSLU2, tummy

[Clover_Kicker]

> Get a $100 NSLU2 and wipe its brain.

Heh, but the MMX was free :)

> no worries that you'll come home and discover that your power supply has started a fire.

I've literally never heard of that happening.

Dude...

[ivan256]

# 1 x NetApp 630 with 1.1TB of disk serving both NFS and CIFS

Why don't you sell that, replace it with $500 worth of stuff, and pay off your mortgage? Or at least your power bill?

And if you think that comes close to being a data center sized installation, clearly you don't know what a datacenter is. You're more like the server closet at a small business at this point.... And you're wasting a ton of energy.

obligatory

[mckwant]

-Yelling like a playwright-

There's naught wrong with gala luncheons, lad!!!!!

-/Yelling-

Better in all caps (lameness filter).

Power5+ QCM

[Anonymous Coward]

Like ,say, the IBM Power5+ Quad core module ?
Choose between the following:
IBM System p5 510Q starting @ $8,536
IBM System p5 520Q
IBM System p5 550Q
IBM System p5 560Q starting @ $21,377

4.8TB of RAID space + Kerberos

[Yeechang Lee]

I only have five computers (one Athlon 1400GHz, one dual Xeon 2.8GHz, and one Pentium 4 3.0GHz, all running Fedora Core 3 or 4, plus one iBook G4 800MHz and one Infrant ReadyNAS 600) plus a gigabit Ethernet switch. Two things, however, cause my setup to stand out from the crowd:

* Between the dual Xeon and ReadyNAS, I have 4.8TB of RAID storage. That Pentium 4 is a MythTV box with three HDTV feeds, and given the massive sizes of HD recordings, I need all the space I can get.
* Kerberos 5 single-signon authentication. One username and password gets me on to any machine on the network.

Re:Queerest Ask Slashdot. Evar.

[stienman]

This is the equivalent of either a dick-size or old-school engine displacement war.

Not necessarily. There is a glass door to one of the server rooms at the University of Michigan, and I like to look inside and see what they have. I don't feel jealousy, I don't hope that one day I'll have rows of racks of glowing lights, I'm just interested in the equipment and setup.

My primary hobby now is electronics. I like to look at other people's projects. Occasionally various forums, mailing lists, etc will have "show your workroom/workbench/nook/etc" threads, and you get to see a lot of generally interesting, mostly messy, occasionally funny, and usually illuminating pictures. One learns a lot by looking at what others do, and asking questions about it.

This does not have to be navel gazing, or one-upsmanship, though it can devolve to that if that's what people want it to be.

You seem to have nothing useful to contribute to this topic, yet you felt compelled to contribute anyway. Perhaps your comment has more to say about how you view the world, than about how others should view this activity.

-Adam

Running mail at home has its advantages...

[Dammital]

"Running mail at home is a waste of my time. It can be done, but you get nothing but hassle out of it..."

After you set up your mail server (admittedly a bunch of upfront hassle) there is precious little maintenance to do. And I get lots of features I couldn't get otherwise:

• Mail clients are filtered through my firewall: I blackhole bogons for example, and certain abusive networks.
• RBLs of my choice: There are good RBLs and bad RBLs. I like the ORDB list, DSBL list, the Spamhaus SBL and XBL lists, the SORBS DUL list, and the Spamcop blocking list.
• Greylisting: This is effective for eliminating the remaining spam that makes it through your SMTP-time filters.
• Challenge-response: Yeah, I know... love 'em or hate 'em. TMDA has been useful to me in the past, though I'm not sure I'm going to keep it much longer.
• One-time email addresses: If you maintain your own server and domain, then you can have as many email addresses as you want. Expire them on your schedule, or perform special processing for mail received at those addresses.
• Forget about artificial mail-size limits: My ISP's email accounts cut off attachments at something like 2MB. So much for that camping video my friend wanted to send me. My personal mail server is much more forgiving.
• Flexible and secure access: My mail clients use POP3 and IMAP inside the firewall, and IMAP via SSH port-forwarding from the outside.

As I said: nontrivial to set up, but easy to run afterward. I don't touch it except to update the code from time to time or to review the logs. Maybe one of these days I'll put up a webmail interface if I can figure out this newfangled SSL thing.

I miss the VAX

[Roadkills-R-Us]

I had a chance at a free 11/780 years ago. I wanted it soooo bad. (Still do).

But I couldn't afford the wiring and A/C changes, much less the electric bill, at the time.

I really, really want some sort of VAX running VMS.

Sounds like you have an inferiority complex!

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Or is it just that you're whipped, and your other half won't let you have what you want?

Whaytever that may be...

I have just what I need (evolving, of course)

[Roadkills-R-Us]

At home:
  - 500MHz K6 as router running Freesco (it was $5)
  - 500MHz K6 with RAID5 IDE drives as file/print/scanner server
      running RH9 (cost, $40 total)
  - dual 1800+ Athlon main desktop running SL4 ($150 or so)
  - 1200+ AMD something as another desktop running SL4 (cost $50)
  - HP SCSI scanner
  - middle orf the road Epson printer
  - 350MHz Dell Latitude laptop running Win98 for specialized apps
      not available on Linux (cost $200 4+ years ago)

All that was bought surplus. Monitors bought new and not included.
I have everything on hefty APC BackUps or SmartUps which were
bought refurb from APC or new. A couple of basic SMC 10/100
switches bought new. Earthlink cable via TW/RR.

I have a 300MHz PII RM server I bought used from Berkeley
Communications at a local colo as my web/email/DNS/etc server.
I'm probably going to switch to a virtual server through some
provider running Linux virtual servers.

Pretty wimpy by geek standards? I don't care. It does what
we need it to do. It's solid. It's fast enough for us.

Would I love to have a bunch of rackmount servers like at
work? Not really. One dual Opteron from Penguin Computing
would be nice, but I don't need it at any level, so I'm not
about to spend 2K+ on it.

Whoo, that's some HEAT output

[Medievalist]

Those 11/34s run a lot cooler than 11/70s, and the 3100 wasn't so bad, but aren't some of those 4000 class machines serious space-heaters?

I just recycled a whole bunch of old macs and an antique SPARC last month because they were never getting used for anything. I still have a 3100e with OpenVMS hobbyist but I never turn it on anymore... sad really.

Large Data Center?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've met have enough computing and storage resources to have themselves classified as large data centers."

I don't know many people with 30,000 sq. ft. houses (size of some "large data centers" I've been in) let alone that much space to dedicate to computers.

Re:Large Data Center?

[putaro]

You missed the footnote.

I've met have enough computing and storage resources to have themselves classified as large data centers.*

-----------
* A large data center circa 1983

Re:Queerest Ask Slashdot. Evar.

[Gothmolly]

Perhaps the fact that my comment was moderated up has more to say about the current state of Slashdot, which was entirely my point.

Don't get me started...!

[martinultima]

Oops, too late!

Let's see, as a Linux developer I've got right now – and likely more coming, knowing the way people dump all their old machines on me –

(unless otherwise stated assume Ultima version 8)

Celeron 2.4GHz / 512MB, homebuilt – Ultima Linux (my distro) – main system, development machine, usually print server as well. Sometimes does NFS.

Epson Stylus CX4800 – nice people at Epson sent a free replacement/upgrade when my CX-4600 died after just ten months... even with the likes of me that's almost impossible.

Celeron 1.8GHz / 512MB, Dell Dimension 2300 – Ultima + WinXP Home – family machine, Windows partition is spyware-infested as usual ;-)

Brother MFC-210C – yes, it does run on Linux now that they released the drivers.

Celeron 700MHz / 128MB, Dell OptiPlex GX100 – Ultima + Win98SE – $55 on eBay; more or less test box for all the dangerous stuff

Pentium III 650MHz / 256MB, Compaq DeskPro E6000 – Ultima + Win98SE – my brother's machine, also $55 (upgraded a little bit since then with parts from other boxes)

Celeron 566MHz / 128MB, Dell Dimension L566cx – Ultima + Win98SE (latter not yet installed) – first a family machine, then my dev machine, then my brother's, and now my sister's

Pentium 233MHz / 96MB, Dell Latitude CP – Ultima – my new laptop, still needs "breaking in"

Pentium 133MHz / 80MB, Micron TransPort XPE – Ultima 4 + OpenBSD – old laptop, been using for years, now dual-boots Ultima and OpenBSD. I (heart) OpenBSD

Duron 700MHz / 256MB – Ultima – full-time Web/SSH/FTP server that runs all the Ultima Linux sites, my homepage, and a few friends' blogs. Actually belongs to my friend, but I'm stuck running it. Lucky me.

Also have lying around a NEC PinWriter P2200 dot-matrix, HP DeskJet original (still functioning), a couple Palm Pilots, and probably my favorite machine of all time, a now-dead GRiD 1720 with a 16MHz 286 processor, 4MB RAM, and 60MB disk. Ran Windows 3.1 so beautifully... probably the only machine I could ever tolerate a Micro$oft product on.

Used to have a 486, and a few others. Got rid of them eventually after they either crashed or were just taking up too much space. Probably going to wind up back here this weekend anyway, since my friend (same guy who owns the server) is bringing all that stuff over here again.

Most of my machines (the 2.4GHz dev box, OptiPlex, Dimension 2300, and whichever laptop I'm currently using) are hardwired into the network with Ethernet, everything else is wireless. Except the GRiD of course ;-) Runs off of a pair of NETGEAR WG612(?) routers – one v4, the other v6. Took an entire weekend wiring the two together with 100ft of cable and going through the attic...

Electricity?

[thpdg]

What's your light bill like?

Ow, that hurt.

[Medievalist]

You should not try to compete with BadAnalogyGuy.

I can see both sides of this, though. I like to hire guys who have the efficiency bug, guys who want the most elegant solution to every problem, rather than guys who are so fascinated with technology that they aren't offended by baroque Rube Goldberg contraptions. On the other claw, a guy who is too obsessed with perfection never completes anything, and a guy who is not an explorer is unlikely to keep up with current technologies that could be very useful.

Post and beam?

[Medievalist]

You mean that for real? Like, your house would not fall down if you tore off all the drywall and siding and 2x4s and just had a naked frame holding up your roof and all your stuff? You have trunnels pinning your tenons?

My house is post and beam, but it's been around for a century or two. You gotta have the big bucks if you are building real post and beam these days! It's a better investment than a bunch of soon-to-be-worthless computers, though.

Re:Post and beam?

[museumpeace]

cost: It depends strongly on quality of finish materials: stone floors and counters or linoleum and formica? I built 4000 sq.ft, including an indoor swimming pool, passive solar heated for around $30/sq.ft. circa 1981. Its all red oak frame, with arched kneebraces. The land and the taxes in my particular town are outrageously expensive but sticks and bricks cost the same whereever you put them together...if you do the putting.

The frame technique is modified barn frame. Horizontally in the middle of this picture you see a beam that has tracklighting somehow sprouting downward from it. To the right is one of the joints. The modificatin is to use steel tubing welded up into an X anchored to the top of the posts and beams laminated of 2x10+2x6+2x10 producing a channel in the beam that fits over the projecting metal of the X's. Goes together like tinkertoys rather than traditional "bents"...you build it up one floor at a time more like steel skyscraper construction. We liked the tracklighting in our old place and made provision for it in a plank-on-joist floor sytem [no drop ceiling to hide the wires!] so the ability to do additional wiring is really more of a fortunate accident than the plan I would like to claim. Only real wood peg construction is where the knee braces are tennoned into the posts and the cathedral roof structure.

I have had occasion to move a few walls. Thats the real beauty of the frame: just take a sledge hammer and erase the wall. There are no bearing walls.

What does the home user need?

[tbuskey]

A computer to work on. One for the wife/gf/bf/SO. One for each kid.

A common place to store things on.
        file server
        web server
        media server

Firewall to NAT the internet
          wireless for laptops

Printing
        print server
        networked printers

Hobby stuff the whole family might use
        X10 stuff
        Stereo stuff
        PVR/Tivo
        MP3 playing
        Photography storage
        old computers
        gaming consoles/computers

So what do I have?
      2 laptops with wirless
      2 tivos on network
      1 family computer w/ DVD burner/scanner/color printer
      1 networked laser printer (ink is expensive)
      1 wireless AP
      1 firewall (might combine with AP)
      1 server (dual PII)
            file server
                me, wife, photo storage
            web server for digital pictures
            galleon for extra tivo function
Hobby systems
      1 older PC to run Mr House for X10 control
          timer for outside lights
          platform for future control and sensing
      1 Sun system to run Solaris 10
      1 SGI running IRIX
      a PC running windows or linux or solaris or xBSD
      a sparc running xBSD
      several old 68k macintoshes
      several old PCs
      several old Sparc systems

I might play with iSCSI on the old PCs to give the file server more storage. I want to scan in old photos that are not in digital format. I want sensors to see if the basement is flooded, the sump pump is working, etc. Maybe a weather station. Maybe a webcam for a baby monitor. I want my kids to see that the world is not all PCs.

More of the same . . .

[elbles]

I'm a college student, so it's nothing too fancy or expensive (all obtained on eBay or through my school's auction), but it's fun to learn on, play with, and learn about high availability, and what happens when everyone's MP3 access disappears. :-)

File Server: IBM Dual Pentium Pro 200 MHz box, 256 megs of RAM, currently just one 100 gig PATA/133 hard drive using XFS, to be expanded to a few SATA drives in a RAID 5 array, heavily updated/customized RH7.3 install using 2.6 kernel (it's sitting behind a firewall, of course)

Mail/DNS/Auth Server: Compaq Proliant 800, Dual Pentium III 550 MHz, 256 megs of RAM, 4 UW SCSI drives in a RAID5 array (3 in the array, 1 as a hot spare), FC4 with my customizations

Firewall/Router/SQL/VPN box: Gateway G6-366c, Celeron 366 MHz, 64 megs of RAM, and draws next to zero power, while still being plenty reliable. Don't ask why it's running SQL instead of on the big box though, I don't really know, heh. FC4.

Random server/Syslog/Home Automation box: IBM ThinkPad 390, Pentium II 266 MHz, 256 megs of RAM. CentOS 4.2.

Old SQL server: Sun SPARCstation 5, 70 MHz, 32 megs of RAM, 540 MEGAbyte SCSI HD (originally ran Solaris 8, then I moved it to RH6.2). Needless to say, this machine isn't running anymore, just because it's ancient. Most solid piece of hardware I've ever seen though. :-)

Random toy box: SGI Indigo2, MIPS R4400 at 150 MHz, 96 megs of RAM, some size SCSI HD, IRIX 6.5.13, IIRC. I don't use it for much, I got it to play with another UNIX that I couldn't use on Intel hardware. Solid machine though . . .

2 managed 24-port switches: 1 Dell PowerConnect 3024, 1 Asante IntraSwitch 6224 (the Dell is the only one in use, the Asante isn't nearly as good)

Linksys WAP54G access point (acting just as a bridge, basically, between the wired and wireless portions of the network)

2 APC SmartUPS 1400's, 1 smaller MGE UPS for when the power goes out (all servers are connected to the UPS they are plugged into for automatic shutdown)

I cabled the entire house myself with Cat5e. The only thing left I really want to do is terminate it properly on the "data center" end (it's currently just solid Cat5e with RJ45 connectors on them, which will change as soon as I have money to pickup a patch panel on eBay). For the moment, I am 600 miles away for months at a time (studying Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech), and there are no problems with the setup that I can't fix from here . Gotta love Linux/UNIX.

Joining the fray

[Ashtead]

I read this thread, and then started enumerating the various computers around here ... turned out to be more of them than expected. Now, only a few of these are actually on, and a couple others are so obsolete as to be nearly useless, but they all work - here goes, starting with the ones in front of me:

These are connected to the LAN and stay on most of the time. Yeah, there is the power bill, but the winters are cold here, and I can use the waste heat.

AMD Athlon running Linux (Red Hat 9), which I am writing this on.

AMD K6 running Linux (originally Slackware, but the kernel has been updated to 2.6.10) This also has Windows NT4 as another part of dual-boot but I haven't used that for ages. Mostly IRC, some browsing and development.

Pentium 2 running FreeBSD, this is for http and ssh and it also has a connection to a thermometer for the outside, whose readings can be obtained inside the LAN on port 9991.

Dell Poweredge running Fedora Core 4. I do 64-bit development work on this one through ssh or KVM extension, as the machine itself is too noisy to work with up close. I've hooked this up to the mains through its own energy meter, so I can see how expensive it actually is to run.

Another Pentium 2, a HP Vectra that I was given since it wouldn't run Windows 2000 anymore -- I wiped it, got Slackware 9 going on it, and I use it for microcontroller development and file storage. It runs nice and quiet, so it is a nice machine for desktop use.

A 486 sits in the basement, and records the inside temperature and the activity in the boiler room once per hour. This runs Linux Red Hat 6, and has done so for many years continually. Uptime is only been limited by the quality of the mains power...

Another Pentium 2 sits in the garage hooked up to a voltmeter and relays, and currently runs cron jobs for turning the outside lights on in the evenings and off in the morning, and every week it charges the battery of the old car that is parked there for the winter. The voltmeter allows me to check the battery voltage.

The following lot is turned on and off regularly, from once a day and down:

The Fujitsu Siemens portable. This is the main work machine, it runs Windows XP, only, and I use it daily for most work-related development work,

The portable Dell 610. Used to be the main machine until its hard disk failed. I replaced the hard disk, and I use it as a secondary work machine and sometimes data-logging in one of the cars. Dual-boot Windows 2000 and Linux, I mostly use Linux on it.

The HP9000-370. This is about 20 years old, runs HP-UX 7, and still sees some occasional use for data-logging or experiments. I have a 6-way relay controller using IEEE-488 for it, and it has 5 serial ports to which many interesting and useful units can be connected.

There are 4 more machines which were put together from bits and pieces left over from other, earlier, kit that had failed, which run Linux or FreeBSD, but I don't use them for anything at the moment.

Then there is the little skinny 386 that once was used for a BBS, now I got Minix to run on it, with a NE2000 network card, so even this old box makes it onto the LAN occasionally.

An old Pentium 1 portable computer with a broken screen hinge. Used to be the main work computer until about 2000, but has since been used for occasional looks at old code. Runs MS-DOS+Windows 3.11, Windows 95, or Windows NT 4 depending on which external hard disk is connected.

All the above machines are able to connect to the LAN. There are a few routers and switches and hubs here, all of the $20 SOHO variety, I don't bother enumerating these. All the network-enabled machines have names associated with them, and this gives them more of a presence. The others become anonymous like bulk equipment...

Only one of the remaining machines is used regularly.

The JDR-XT, my first computer actually, which I bought as a set of parts in 1986, and assembled. It has an EPROM burner which h

Re:Queerest Ask Slashdot. Evar.

[slowhand]

Dammit! Now you've insulted my 440-6bbl Barracuda, my 318 Challenger, my hot spare 440, my old waiting-to-rebuild 440, and my old 318. Plus my hot spare Torqueflite, my old torqueflite, and my spare 4 speed. And my spare 3.55:1 rear! My Hemi will kick your 2.3 liter butt!

The business concept they have makes sense.

[CFD339]

I'd assumed most of the "support" was done remotely and had been outsourced to some forsaken bit of the world with bad water but good IP connection.

I'm about to "upgrade" and move to a larger server there. I plan to require it be in the VA data center I think. If you have any advice on dealing with them or what to ask for versus what to avoid, it would sure be appreciated.

Re:The business concept they have makes sense.

[muhgcee]

I sent a full reply to your email, but I thought everyone here reading should know that the support is done by real Americans in San Antonio. Anything that requires physical access is done by a datacenter monkey. And depending on the skill of the monkey, they might also do some things that don't require physical access to close out the ticket.

Re:The business concept they have makes sense.

[CFD339]

Thanks. That's good to know. I've found the problem with outsourcing is that you get exactly what you ask for without regard to what you actually need.

Home Setup

[DoctorDyna]

Mkay, I figured I would participate in this, to kill some time.

Back room of the house is basically an office, which holds:

Old AMD 1.4 T-Bird running Server 2003, 3x 73GB U160 10 Seagates. One for misc files, one for some old mp3's and one my girlfriend uses for..whatever.

One workstation, P4 1.5 ghz (old dell I pillaged for working parts) Runs WinXP.

One laptop, PIII 1ghz, mostly for browsing the web when were too lazy to go to a real computer.

Livingroom: P4 2.4ghz, Windows Media Center, all teh gidgets.

Network stuff: several netgear gigabit switches, cat5,6 cabinet and an un-used single mode fiber patch panel (my next project)

My Home setup

[boy_afraid]

1. 1 x KnoppMyth based MythTV backend server (840 GB)
2. 2 x KnoppMyth based MythTV front end in living room and bedroom
3. 1 x WRT54GX 4-port wireless router providing high speed network for home use
4. 1 x Gateway laptop wife uses for home office
5. 1 x HP laptop I use for work
6. 1 x Apple G4 for general use
7. 2 x external hard drives for backups
8. 1 x Sony Playstation 2 for online playing
9. 1 x XBox 1 for online playing
10. 1 x HP OfficeJet 6110 for home printing
11. 1 x Print Server to allow printing from any connected or wireless connection on home network
12. 2 x Tivo
13. 3 x unused latops waiting to ressurected
14. 3 x unused desktops waiting to ressurected

Word.

[Medievalist]

Nice job! I like the arched bracing.

I'll remember that wood-over-steel technique if I have to replace any major members in the house. I'm using Eastern Red Cedar to replace some posts in the barn, due to insect woes.