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

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.

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

[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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Coming next week on Ask Slashdot...

[Sloppy]

How long is your penis?

Re:Not extravagant

[Eideewt]

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

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.