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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 x RedHat 9 quad processor PIII Xeon web server+other general duties stuff
- 1 x FC3 router/VPN server
- 1 x Astaro secure unix firewall/external router
- 1 x FC3 email ( http://zimbra.com/ ) server + backup server
- 1 x Mac G3 OSX 10.3.9 print server
- 1 x WinXP print server/general use machine
- 1 x WinXP general purpose home machine + TIVO media center server
- 1 x UltraSparc 10, Solaris 9, play machine + web server
- 2 x WinXP laptops
- 1 x Apple PowerBook 17"
- 1 x NetApp 630 with 1.1TB of disk serving both NFS and CIFS
- 2 x external USB 200GB drives for backups of main data in NetApp DCF
- 3 x inkjet printers scattered around the house
- 1 x 8 port GigE main DCF backbone switch
- 1 x 32 port Etherport III main home network switch
- 1 x WRT54G switch providing high speed network for interal home use
- 1 x befw11s4 switch + range extender for slow-speed, high range, general home use
- 1 x TIVO!
- 4 x spare machines laying around waiting to be purposed
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
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
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.
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?"
..." 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.
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
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.
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
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.)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
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.
-Lod
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.
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.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...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
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
- 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.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.)
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
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.