Slashdot Asks: What's In Your Home Datacenter?

First time accepted submitter jvschwarz writes There was a time when I had rack-mount systems at home, preferring old Unix boxes, Sun-3 and early SPARC machines, but have moved to low-power machines, Raspberry Pi systems, small NAS boxes, etc. Looks like some are taking it to another level. What do other slashdotters have in their Home Datacenter?

Comments

Small setup

[manu0601]

Small setup here: 12U rack with 2 servers and one switch (Yes, I have ethernet sockets in every room except toilets, though I regret a bit I did not install one there)

Re:Small setup

[hawguy]

Small setup here: 12U rack with 2 servers and one switch (Yes, I have ethernet sockets in every room except toilets, though I regret a bit I did not install one there)

What do you do with ethernet to each room? I have a single 802.11n dual band Wifi router that serves the whole house, I can stream at least up to the speed of my internet connection (50mbit) from anywhere in the house and in the small front or back yards. My TVs are both Wifi enabled, and I can stream "SuperHD" Netflix streams from both simultaneously. I have a second 802.11bg Wifi router that's dedicated to a few several IP security cameras.I have a central fileserver plugged into the ethernet port on the Wifi router that stores DVD's, and all of my computers run backups to the fileserver.

So, I'm curious what you do with your home network that you need ethernet to each room?

Re:Small setup

[Electricity Likes Me]

You must live in an amazingly quiet RF area, or have paper-thin walls.

With 802.11n I don't see transfer speeds higher then 1.1 mb/s, presuming only 1 device is online.

Re:Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

Every room has wall plates each with one to four network connections, internal antenna distribution and 2 wired phone jacks and of course wireless. Four monitors around my home work space, computers ? Last count seventeen working and on part of each day, four playing 24/7 server duty... Shit... guess I'm a geek !!

Re:Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you use wifi doesn't mean ethernet is somehow depricated. Some choose to not use wifi for security concerns (lots of nonsense with home gear lately), or even future proofing. There is a simplicity with ethernet that can be appreciated, installing it to every room may not make sense for you, but it may for others.

Re:Small setup

[hawguy]

You must live in an amazingly quiet RF area, or have paper-thin walls.

With 802.11n I don't see transfer speeds higher then 1.1 mb/s, presuming only 1 device is online.

I live in a newish condo, built within the past 10 years, standard wood framed construction. I live in a 50 unit condo complex with a 60 unit apartment across the street, I can see dozens of my neighbor's SSID's, so it's not exactly an RF dead zone. (well, at least not in the 2.4Ghz band. Seems that AT&T is still issuing single band Wifi equipment since I see a lot of AT&T SSID's, but none in 5Ghz, I still get my own 5Ghz channel because 5Ghz is so rarely used around here)

I use an Asus RT-66U as my Wifi router, centrally located on the second floor, antennas rotated horizontally to try to maximize vertical radiation patterns to get more signal downstairs.

Re:Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds good. I also ran ethernet all over, but my WiFi covers all but one room, if I use my Chromebook or have company, or use my Android.

Gigabit switches.

Corei7 Win desktop, Chromebook, MacBook(old), MacMini(old), 23" Android desktop, 4 LinuxMint desktops, 4 LinuxMint laptops, netbook with Win7 & Lubuntu, network laser, AiO scanner/fax/color printer, misc. old computers, the oldest of which sit in the basement unplugged, and a nice RAID NAS. My wife just has a single MacBook.

Re:Small setup

[hawguy]

Just because you use wifi doesn't mean ethernet is somehow depricated. Some choose to not use wifi for security concerns (lots of nonsense with home gear lately),

Even if I had ethernet to every room, I'd still want Wifi since the devices I use every day don't have ethernet ports, so there goes the security (though with careful network segmentation, I could keep the Wifi network separate from the wired network, but that sounds like a lot of work for a home network)

or even future proofing.

Wifi speeds keep moving forward, but are already fast enough that most home users wouldn't notice any difference between wireless and wired speeds. Though as frequencies increase, putting a Wifi node in each room might be neccessary.

There is a simplicity with ethernet that can be appreciated, installing it to every room may not make sense for you, but it may for others.

Hence my question "What do you use it for", which you didn't really answer.

Re: Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

2 smart GB switches, 1 hub, 3 business routers, 1 wifi router, 1 enterprise router, 2 400 series raid servers, 2 engineering workstation servers, 4 cube stations, 3 wworkstation, 1 liquid cooled cyberpower, 1camera server, mostly nix's with 2 win boxes and one raid nas....

Small sounds pretty good about now...

Re:Small setup

[timeOday]

Try streaming mpeg-ts captures from broadcast TV over wireless. They put Netflix to shame.

Another think that hardly works at all over wireless is remote X clients. X is amazingly sensitive to latency. (Yes, you can try to set up NX etc...)

Re:Small setup

[Hamsterdan]

Ethernet is faster, more reliable, and less susceptible to interference. Right now I'm picking up about 40 access points (might be more, my card is only 2.4. Besides, transfering stuff is faster with Gigabit ethernet...

Re:Small setup

[timeOday]

Come to think of it, and more fundamentally, even sharing a home directory to clients using NFS over WiFi does not work at all. Just loading firefox loads something like 50 MB of profile data from disk, NOT including the program itself, and latency kills nfs throughput. (Again, you can dink around with the settings endlessly, to little effect that I've seen).

WiFi really only works for newer things designed to be cloud-friendly.

Re:Small setup

[EvilSS]

Try streaming mpeg-ts captures from broadcast TV over wireless. They put Netflix to shame.

I've done this and it does work. The problem I always ran into wasn't the bandwidth, it was the encryption. I would cook the routers streaming 1080p TS files with WPA2 enabled. Eventually gave up and ran ethernet. Living in a rental townhouse, I had to get creative with runners and area rugs to do that without punching holes in walls...

Re:Small setup

[MightyYar]

The force is strong with you. I have everything hardwired because I could never get Wifi to work reliably, or with the speeds that I need. It might be related to my needing 2 routers to provide coverage to the entire house.

Re:Small setup

[Osgeld]

bout to say, do a full hard disk backup over wifi heh

I only have wifi right now except for the main 2 computers and its both handy and a pain in the ass when you want to setup something in the other room without wifi

Re:Small setup

[futuresheep]

"SuperHD" Netflix is only 6-7Mb/sec at best so two streams shouldn't be a difficult feat for any recent wifi router. It's no different for DVD's which peak at 11Mb/sec. Try something like a full BR rip, 802.11n just doesn't cut it.

Re:Small setup

[QuasiEvil]

For me, I just like wired ethernet better. Overall, simpler to configure, use, secure, and manage, and you can't beat gigabit links for bandwidth/$. I have 802.11n, but pretty much all it does is allow the laptops, tablets, and phones onto the network. The MythTV frontends, desktop machines, and home automation/telemetry bits are all hard-wired. I also keep all my data on a central fileserver in the basement, so having gigabit links from the desktop machines (and laptops when I plug them in) really makes working with large datasets significantly faster.

As for my setup, it's really rather unimpressive from any datacenter standpoint.

Upstairs closet:
  - Wireless AP (802.11n) and NAT box (TP Link WDR4300 running OpenWRT)
  - Cable modem
  - Managed 24-port gigabit switch (serves 3rd and 2nd floor ports, dual fiber links to downstairs switch)
  - UPS

Basement closet:
  - Managed 24-port gigabit switch (serves basement, and 1st floor ports, dual fiber links to upstairs switch, dual fiber to backup fileserver in detached garage)
  - House fileserver
  - MythTV/home automation/voip/webserver box
  - Tuners (HDHomeRun and DirecTV gear + HD-PVRs),
  - ISY-99 Insteon gateway
  - UPS

Re:Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

And all your LAN are belong to any bored wardriver. Some of us have a better security posture and local infrastructure.

Air is a shitty medium any way you look at it, get off of your ass and run some copper.

Re:Small setup

[Penguinisto]

Dude - I live in a 105-year-old house, in a small town just outside Portland (OR), and I still do well even with a big front/back yard.

The trick? Easy:
1) the wifi router is upstairs, away from the chimney but with a clear shot downstairs (and to each bedroom).
2) It's an ASUS router (screw that cheapie one that the ISP gives you; disable that and hard-line to a decent wifi router with a good reputation made for gaming.)
3) Scan the frig out of your neighborhood, and pick a channel no one else is using.

Result? In spite of my laptop, the TV, Dish DVR, my wife's iPad, and two Android phones (albeit I keep wifi off on mine)... http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3771041924 (taken off my MacBook Pro just now.)

Re:Small setup

[Penguinisto]

I use an Asus RT-66U as my Wifi router, centrally located on the second floor, antennas rotated horizontally to try to maximize vertical radiation patterns to get more signal downstairs.

Exact same model and rigging here... though the house I live in uses the old plaster-and-lath walls (it's an old beast).

Re:Small setup

[bobjr94]

I agree. We have wifi of course, but on GB lan I get 80-100 MB/second on transfers.

Re:Small setup

[profplump]

Some people -- particularly those with 2 servers -- transfer data on paths other then WiFi endpoint Internet. Wired Ethernet is definitely faster in such cases. It's also frequently more reliable, easier to secure, allows simultaneous full-speed transfers, is full-duplex, doesn't incur a repeater penalty for transfer among local endpoints, requires less configuration and frequently avoids the need for custom driver installation.

Not that there's anything wrong with WiFi. It has lots of useful applications, its own set of benefits, and is definitely sufficient or even preferable for many installations. But to suggest that there's no use for wired Ethernet in a tech-heavy home scenario is ludicrous.

Re:Small setup

[phantomfive]

Also harder to MITM

Re:Small setup

[Bert64]

I have both ethernet in every room and wifi...
Ethernet is quite a bit faster for bulk data transfers, has less latency, is less prone to interference and to increase bandwidth you can lay more cables whereas there is finite wifi spectrum. I also have several devices which don't support wifi, or would require expensive optional hardware to do so.
My house has thick walls, so wifi coverage is somewhat weaker in places, and the garage is separate from the house and has virtually no signal at all.
I tend to use ethernet for static devices, leaving more bandwidth available for devices that actually move around. I also tend to plug my laptop in to ethernet if i need to do a large transfer.

Re:Small setup

[viperidaenz]

I'm using 11g right now and it can max out my 25mbit internet connection.
On the other side of the house it's about half as good.

Re:Small setup

[goarilla]

Hence my question "What do you use it for", which you didn't really answer.

Making backups of central storage.

Re: Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

He keeps from sharing his data with crackers, at least via the network.

Re:Small setup

[ruir]

Amen to that. 2.4GHz did not cut out for me, often was waiting 5 minutes just to get the bars on the wifi icon. Moved to 5GHz and now I can do downloads from the Internet via wifi at 80Mbps.

Re:Small setup

[LordWabbit2]

Nice Router, I had to run an Ethernet cable downstairs from the loft into a second router on the first floor to cover the rest of my house. House is all brick and mortar, not sure what the floor is made out of but it stops the wireless signal dead. On the plus side I stuck the router behind the TV and plugged it into the network. Can stream anything to the TV without any hiccups.

Re:Small setup

[thegarbz]

You must live in an amazingly quiet RF area, or have paper-thin walls.

I see this kind of comment on Slashdot often, frankly I think you live in an amazingly noisy RF area. I've gotten pretty much full speeds of 802.11n. I can see 14 other access points from my phone but they are all relatively low dB compared to my main wireless router, and my access point on the opposite side of the house (installed because I needed access in the backyard, not because of deficiencies in a house). I suppose if you live in high density apartments then wifi can be a problem but doesn't most of the world live in suburbia, in either town houses, unit complexes, or actual proper houses?

Re:Small setup

[MMC Monster]

Agree 100%. I with I had more ethernet connections in my livingroom and bedroom media closets. When I finish my basement I'm not going to make the same mistake.

WiFi is great for laptops and phones and stuff, but I don't want my movies or music glitching because of wifi interference.

Re:Small setup

[MMC Monster]

As an aside, what's an excellent wifi repeater? Mine can't cover an acre, but my back yard gets wifi signals from across the street.

Re:Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand using ethernet where possible, to reduce interference and gain speed and reliability.

Overall, I try to use ethernet for fixed positions/devices and wireless for phones/tablets and guests.
In the office room, even the laptop is mostly connected by ethernet as well.

For the bathroom, indeed it requires a bit more of imagination. Other then music (where encrusted systems would be more neat), what could ethernet be used for?

Re:Small setup

[Archtech]

Isn't it simply a question of what your house is made of? I have seen houses in the USA that seem to be built almost wholly from wood; no problem there. My house has external brick walls, but the internal walls are breezeblock, presumably with some steel reinforcement. Result: wireless works OK vertically (through the light wooden ceilings and floors) but often not at all horizontally or diagonally. I'm sitting here participating in this thread with wireless, but I have purchased a good (Diavolo) powerline networking system so I can always plug in wired Ethernet through the nearest mains socket.

Re:Small setup

[wagnerrp]

So, I'm curious what you do with your home network that you need ethernet to each room?

Use it with a bunch of stationary devices? Two-way broadcast communication should only be used for mobile devices.

Re:Small setup

[GTRacer]

[...] and two Android phones (albeit I keep wifi off on mine)...

May I ask why you keep WiFi off at home? I completely understand keeping it off away from home (Thank you Llama!) to keep ad-snoops from trying to tag me in stores, etc... But home?

Then again, my poorly-positioned and very outdated Linksys WRT-54G can't get a VOD-capable signal into my room from the den some days, so it's mobile data at home a lot for me ><

Re:Small setup

[wagnerrp]

Did you seal up the cooling vents? If a router overheats trying to run sustained full rate, or in this case a mere 1/10th of full rate, I think you need to get your money back.

Re: Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still using a hub?

Re:Small setup

[Bengie]

I get a solid 110-115MB/s, but I have SSDs.

Re:Small setup

[SpzToid]

This is the technical explanation that has eluded me for years. Thank you. I hope you get modded up.

Re:Small setup

[SirCowMan]

There is a fellow below with 3 kids and grandparents visiting, I'm with him - a single AP can't handle the traffic, certainly not in a high RF area. I've wired as much as I can in.

I use an 8-port head switch to break off IP-TV & internet onto seperate VLAN's, an older quad-WAN router for routing/firewall/VPN/etc, and a 16 port switch which serves as the main hub for everything. There is a powerline network on a dedicated plug next to the powerbox, with cat6 cable runs off to a pair of branch 8-port switches which are now both full. There is another 5 port switch further down the line as well. I have 4 access points - 1xAC87U, 2xAC68U, and an older AC66U which covers a little dead spot in the library and give a few more ethernet sockets - all wired in, to cover the house with wifi.

For servers, I'm using an older PE2950 with 15 drives running FreeNAS and Plex. I have a newer 1U C1100 running ProxMox ~ for Active Directory, DNSMASQ, Squid, NTP, Zoneminder, Observium etc. I had an extensive setup for caching and ad-filtering from being on a slow and unstable satellite connection, now though on FTTH it's probably a bit overkill but all the same, no extra work to leave it running. It's all on a 1500VA 4U UPS. These are both wired in with bonded connections.

To keep the connection low-latency, high speed, and always available, I had to start wiring things in and move to a dedicated router and additional AP's. For reference, one AP held up to about 15 devices, by 25 on wireless streaming video started to drop-out, now I'm looking at roughly 60 devices (excluding networking gear) - so the more on wired, the better, not just for my network but for my neighbors as well.

The servers ... I had the opportunity to buy a rack worth of equipment complete with some software licenses out of a data center for little more than the cost of picking it up, so had to make use of some of it. Makes the basement a bit noisy though.

Re:Small setup

[Penguinisto]

I keep the wifi dead on my phone mostly for battery reasons, coupled with the fact that I have unlimited data on my plan, so it makes no real diff to me. :)

Re:Small setup

[nabsltd]

I get a solid 110-115MB/s, but I have SSDs.

I have just started to build out my 10Gbps backbone at home, and get over 380MB/sec on disk transfers (RAID arrays on both ends). I've got some major tuning to do, though, as I only see about 600MB/sec on the network level. I'd like to get that up to about 900MB/sec. I have switches at several places in the house that give me 1Gbps wired to most rooms. One bedroom gets wired connectivity from DirecTV cabling, and there are two WiFi access points for various portable devices.

Otherwise, I have a CentOS box serving as an iSCSI SAN (14TB) for 3 ESX hosts. I also have a separate file server (9TB), and several user workstations (desktops and laptops).

The only hardware I use that is designed to be rack mounted is the networking gear, because most rack-mount servers are too loud.

Re:Small setup

[andyring]

Nothing fancy, a Mac Mini with a UPS in the furnace room where my router/WiFi base station is located, with several drives and a MagicJack plugged into it. One 3TB for home stuff like Time Machine backups and my VOD archive and a couple other 4TB drives JBOD'd for nightly remote off-site backups of my company's primary server. Also have a 60-foot amplified USB cable running from that basement furnace room into my baby's room for a cheap home-brew baby cam monitor. Another camera in the garage so I can quickly see if we forgot to close the garage door.

MagicJack, ewww, right? Well, maybe, but hey, it's dirt cheap and works well for my 9-year-old to have a phone at home if he's home alone which we allow from time to time, like if we need a quick grocery store run, etc.

I ran ethernet throughout my house as needed as well, although there are a couple spots I wasn't able to access. Yeah, WiFi is nice but I live in a pretty new neighborhood, lots of younger families like mine, and very crowded WiFi space including the 5ghz band. Since my TV is entirely streaming (Roku and AppleTV) I wanted it to work solidly, reliably, and not be subject to interference from neighbors. I can sit in my living room and see probably a dozen and a half networks pop up. And I've got a couple BluRay players that don't have WiFi, just ethernet. I just ran a single cat5 wire behind the TV, put a little 4-port switch back there and call it good. I've got an older Proliphix network-enabled thermostat too from before WiFi was even very common, which required Cat5 and PoE to function, so I had to run Cat5 to it which was tricky but doable. It's no Nest but I already own it and I can still adjust the temp from my phone when we aren't home.

Re:Small setup

[phinnvr6]

Have a small setup myself, I recently upgraded my router after many years of Linksys WRT54GL / WRTSL54GS class routers running Tomato and went with a Netgear R7000 (due to the WRT1900AC's terrible open source support). Running DD-WRT (Kong's builds) along with an Ext4 formatted USB 3.0 1TB hard drive (Seagate Backup Plus Slim). This is pretty much my "datacenter". Running Samba for storage and Minidlna for streaming right off the router now, and it works fairly well, meanwhile Kong's DD-WRT builds get better all the time. It pretty much covers my NAS/Datacenter in one 10W device.

Re:Small setup

[Eunuchswear]

I can stream at least up to the speed of my internet connection (50mbit) from anywhere in the house

There's your problem, right there.

Your internet connection is too slow.

Re:Small setup

[Eunuchswear]

For servers, I'm using an older PE2950 with 15 drives running FreeNAS and Plex.

Ow! Power bills!

(Not to mention noise).

(Ah, you did mention it, sorry).

Re:Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 12U rack suspended from the ceiling in the garage. It has a UPS, a big Gigabit switch, a 48 port patch panel, some VOIP hardware, a cable modem, and a slightly older Dell server (R710) with a six-disk hardware RAID array. Buying at least some of this equipment off of eBay meant that it was surprisingly inexpensive for commercial-grade hardware. And a dual Xeon server with plenty of RAM and a nice network-KVM is going to last me a long time, even if it is one or two generations behind what ships new right now.

The cable modem is connected to a USB controlled power outlet. Even though I subscribe to Comcast business-class internet service, the modem crashes every few months and then takes the internet down with it. This is in addition to regular short outages that happen most nights, and the random routing issues that temporarily take out smaller parts of the internet for a few minutes throughout the day. Good thing I don't actually run a business that loses money, if the network disappears for a few minutes every so often. But in any case, my server now automatically power-cycles the modem if it detects a persistent problem.

The network switch supports POE and powers four Ubiquiti WiFi access points that are strategically placed throughout the house. The nice thing about these devices is that a) they are quite competitively priced, b) they can be centrally administered, and c) unlike lots of consumer access points, Unifi APs do actually support roaming without locking up. Next time you travel, check the brand of access points in the hotel; if it says Ubiquiti, it probably works flawlessly, if it says anything else, chances are the WiFi network is a huge pain that never quite works right.

I live in the middle of a big city, and there is so much RF interference, I figure access points are really only good for one or two rooms each. I can see about 200-300 other wireless networks around here. Even if I carefully pick my radio channels to avoid the frequency that my microwave operates on, I still get blasted with lots of RF noise from the neighbors. To get reliable service everywhere, I had to install multiple access points and then partially turn down output power. I think of them as femto cells :-)

Re:Small setup

[Anonymous Coward]

You must live in an amazingly quiet RF area, or have paper-thin walls.

With 802.11n I don't see transfer speeds higher then 1.1 mb/s, presuming only 1 device is online.

Downtown Boston in 10 yr old highrise condo with >100 visible SSIDs, I get 300-400Mbps over 802.11n. Two Aironet APs cover 2200sqft.

Re:Small setup

[Hamsterdan]

I'm using an old hands-me-down Airport Extreme, seems to do the job fine...

Re:Small setup

[thegarbz]

Fascinating. Powerline networking failed miserably at my house. I actually ended up busting out an ethernet cable and crawling under it through the dirt.

I live in a bit of a mix. Internally we're all wood and plasterboard (dry wall I think it's called in the USA). Externally we have a mix of asbestos sheets and hardiflex. But it's not a materials issue. Inside I had problems with wireless reception due to the house layout (study is in the far end of the house) hence I put in a wireless ap, but even outside on my deck I can't pick up more than about 20 other networks and most of them so poorly that any attempt to connect would likely fail unless I bust out a decent antenna.

Re:Small setup

[Chuk]

I just started doing the mpeg-ts thing recently. So pretty.

Re:Small setup

[EvilSS]

Did you seal up the cooling vents? If a router overheats trying to run sustained full rate, or in this case a mere 1/10th of full rate, I think you need to get your money back.

Nope. Most consumer routers are crap and they cut corners on things like thermal management. I went through multiple brands, all with the same issue. And no, I don't live in a jungle. Well, the midwest US but still, I keep the house cool in the summer and downright cold in the winter. If I dropped to WAP, the problems went away, but I will not run my wireless network with WAP. Might was well turn off encryption all together.

Spiner

[turkeydance]

that's the Center of my Data.

Frankenserver

[ihtoit]

Core: ancient Dell laptops, which are nice and quiet and run on 70W power supplies. Seven of those, and five dozen hard drives from 120GB all the way up to 2TB apiece either in USB enclosures or in rackmount/grab boxes which are in turn connected via USB IDE adapters. So there's some hotswapping involved but all told I have about 40TB of storage.

Re:Frankenserver

[Anonymous Coward]

All I have is an old netbook with a broken screen, about a 450GB hard drive, running PC-BSD with a couple of NFS shares.

Re:Frankenserver

[BringsApples]

I have about 40TB of storage.

At your house???

...or your parents' basement? ;)

Re:Frankenserver

[wagnerrp]

Media collections can get real big real fast.

Re:Frankenserver

[Harlequin80]

I run a 22tb Nas server and am running out of space. I'm about to replace all the 1.5tbs in it with 4tb drives.

Re:Frankenserver

[Anonymous Coward]

I have about 40TB of storage.

At your house???

...or your parents' basement? ;)

I have closer to 70TB in my house and garage. It's surprising how much you need with a media server full of movies, web server, file server, and a couple of workstations. Oh, and two independent backups of all three servers. Mind you, we don't have any storage at our cottage.

FYI, my parents live in another country, and my in-laws are several hundred km away.

Re:Frankenserver

[gnasher719]

40TB hard drive space isn't that much. About £1,300 or so with the latest offer I received in some spam email.

40TB reliable data storage, that would be a bit more expensive.

Re:Frankenserver

[ihtoit]

uh... at my house. I've lived here 14 years and raised four children.

Low Power

[the eric conspiracy]

For my always-on machines I have a couple of Atom 525's with perhaps 30 TB of data storage. The OS for those is Scientific Linus 5.x (someday to be Centos 6.x).

These are plenty powerful enough for the services I use them for - files storage, light duty web serving, personal IMAP, DNS caching etc. and sip at the electrical supply.

They are good enough for light duty web browsing as well.

For more challenging applications (like games, photo editing etc) I have a couple of machines running 4 and 6 core I7s with 24GB of RAM. These only get turned on when I need them.

Re:Low Power

[nullchar]

Don't 30 Terabytes of disk use waaaaay more power than two Atoms? How did you get 30 TB linked to those anyway?

Re:Low Power

[jabuzz]

Stick a couple of port multipliers on it. It is a home setup so max out is going to be a couple of 1GbE bonded so about 220MB/s, which is way less than the bandwidth of two SATA2 ports, so with port multipliers that is at least 10 disks, run a RAID6 of 8D+2P with 4TB disk and bingo 32TB of storage. Plenty of Atom boards will take 8GB of RAM which is more than enough for a NAS and the Linux software RAID is all SSE accelerated code so even an Atom has way more grunt than is required.

Home / Work

[Dutch Gun]

Since I work from home now and had to get a bit more serious about my data storage, I bought a Synology Diskstation, and have been quite happy with it. I was a bit worried because I'm more experienced with Windows than Linux by far, but they've got a great web-based interface and hide any sort of complexity, and it connects easily enough to Windows, Mac, and Linux machines.

The Synology has a nice backup program let's me to back up data to an Amazon S3 account. Since it's pay by data volume, and I'm only storing a few GB of code and assets, my monthly bill runs about ten cents a month. My local data is backup up to my NAS, and my NAS backs up to my S3 account. I figure I'm probably pretty well protected that way.

I can't compete with those racks in the linked article, though. My NAS box sits on a desk and has about the footprint of one of those phones, and it doesn't have nearly as many sexy blinking lights and exposed patch cables. Ah well.

Re: Home / Work

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 for Synology. The local->S3 backup is dead simple to set up. I visited the config screen exactly once to configure everything and never had to go back to it.

Re:Home / Work

[bungo]

(aol) Me Too!!! (/aol)

I have a Synology DS512+ with 5x 3T disks. For storage size, capability and low noise, you just can't beat it. And it runs Linux.

It goes well with my
  - Mac Pro (the old big silver box version),
  - i7 with 24G ram (home built)
  - i7 with 64G ram (home built)
  - 2 x Xeon E5-2620 (6 core each) 192G ram
  - Mac Mini

I have ethernet wired through the house, plus a wifi router on each floor.

Ah, the old day were good. I have 2 MicroVaxes, a Vaxsation 5000, a DEC Alpha. A half-height 20 megabyte drive that was as big as a washing machine, and a tape drive, just a bit bigger. A 6-CPU RS/6000, just a bit bigger than a microvax. I also had huge collection of every Sun Sparc you could imagine.

Pity, all of that had to go when I got married. :-(. I've had to build up my current collection by stealth, one piece at a time.

Re:Home / Work

[Just Some Guy]

The Synology has a nice backup program let's me to back up data to an Amazon S3 account.

It also has a Glacier backup, which is great for huge backups that you don't need to restore often (or ever). I use Time Machine to backup our laptops to our DS412+, and it pushes those backup volumes up to Glacier once a week. If something catastrophic happened like a massive earthquake or a house fire, we could recover all our most important data (including irreplaceable like our photos) just by replacing the hardware and clicking "restore". For less than $10 a month, that's a great feeling.

Re:Home / Work

[Anonymous Coward]

>The Synology has a nice backup program let's me to back up data to an Amazon S3 account.

Encrypted or unencrypted?

Re:Home / Work

[Anonymous Coward]

core dumps with a paper punch and a big roll of paper

Re:Home / Work

[Dutch Gun]

Yep, I saw that and considered switching, but at the moment, there are a lot of handy S3 browsing and transfer tools, and not so much for Glacier (at least when I last looked - maybe that's changed). If I needed to, I wanted to be able to view or even retrieve my data with a simple Firefox plugin. Also, of course, there's almost zero financial incentive for me since I'm transferring such small amounts. Since I currently have a relatively slow DSL connection, backing up large amounts of data isn't all that practical anyhow.

For those with a lot of data to push up (photos, videos, etc), I absolutely agree. A weekly backup to Glacier makes a ton of sense, as it's designed specifically for backup scenarios.

Re:Home / Work

[Dutch Gun]

Encryption is only enabled during transmission, but not at rest. The default backup program doesn't currently support the S3 server-side or client-side encryption protocols. If you really need to secure your data and can't trust S3's basic security, then this solution may not work for you.

There are 3rd party backup apps that do client-side encryption, but they use their own cloud services, not S3, so you'll probably pay a bit more for it. You may be able to use a standard Linux backup application, but there are no guarantees there, and you'd have to be comfortable enough to do a bit of tinkering under the hood to set it up manually.

4 servers

[Anonymous Coward]

42U 2 post telecom rack in the garage:

1 One asterisk box
1 Allstar link box (ham radio repeater)
2 Miscellaneous servers for internal web pages and home automation

All are mini-itx servers running of a isolated and dedicated 12V solar/UPS system.

Old school

[slowdeath]

A PDP-8m with 16KW of core memory and a pair of 8" floppy drives, and a VT-320 video terminal.

Re:Old school

[hawguy]

A PDP-8m with 16KW of core memory and a pair of 8" floppy drives, and a VT-320 video terminal.

To be fair, with 12 bit words, that 16KW memory is bigger than it sounds. Probably more memory than any home computer needs anyway.

Re:Old school

[DeathElk]

I see what you mean by "slow death"

Re:Old school

[Anne Thwacks]

Wot no LA36? How do you do your core dumps? (ASCII Pron).

Re:old school

[BringsApples]

Rolodex 1753, Smith-Corona Super12, roll of stamps.

You left out the desk. ;)

Re:Old school

[Anonymous Coward]

...and a pair of 8" floppy drives...

Wow! 8" floppies? We had to use paper tape.

Re:Old school

[MooseMiester]

Best answer yet. Do you have the floppies that make a sound akin to a coat hanger being beaten against a pie pan, or do you have the newer ones?

Once one has heard that sound... one never forgets it.

Re:old school

[MooseMiester]

What, no stapler?

Nope.

[jpellino]

Personal devices and hdd / cloud backup. I move a lot of data and herd machines all day long at work. At work. I would no sooner bring that level of stuff home than as a rancher I'd have a horse in the living room (though I know some who let them eat through the kitchen window...)

Sun Ultra Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun Ultra 2, as the in house porn server.

NAS, HTPC, Desktop

[sanosuke001]

Windows 7 Desktop (gaming) Phenom II with 16GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 2TB storage Windows 8 HTPC, Ceton InfiniTV Tuner FreeNAS server, 12U rack, 24 port managed switch (server has 2 gbit connections), 6 SAS JBOD card, 8x 3TB HDD, 8x 4TB HDD, RAID-Z2 on both sets. 35.4TB total.

Learning Lab

[millhouse513]

When we moved into our house, I managed to pick up a full rack off craigslist. I'd planned to populate it with all my servers (a collection of vintage Unix systems as well as some modern vmware nodes). Part way through I realized I value a cooler and quieter room so I've been working to move everything over to quieter systems. For my vintage collection there's not much I can do -- SGI and Sun boxes only came in a few ways, but I tend to keep them off for the most part. My "main" systems have gone from a few really loud, power hungry, heaters, to more specific purpose boxes. For example, my FreeNAS box was an older ebay Xeon server complete w/server grade (read: LOUD) fans, but is now an i5 server with more RAM than before (and faster) and it's so quiet I can't tell when it's on. A few other "servers" I'm moving from 2-3U boxes to 4U boxes with larger 120mm fans. I'll probably grow it one or two more servers as things change but I'll be much more focused on power and cooling rather than raw power. The server rack will stay though...My friends that helped move it in said that I had to sell it with the house, so if anyone is looking for a house in Texas in 5-10 years and wants a server rack, I may have just the house ;-)

Re:Learning Lab

[Electricity Likes Me]

My purchase of the year last year was a 42u rack for $1 off ebay.

Though technically I think the seller got a better deal, because I had to navigate that thing down the narrowest stairs ever before getting into an elevator it couldn't stand up in. I think basically I paid them for the removal bill.

Re:Learning Lab

[ls671]

Maybe, I don't see the use for u-racks anymore for a home data centers. I just use a desktop with four screens attached to it and one server with 64GB RAM acting as file server/firewall/router and running a bunch of virtual machines with qemu. XVNC or RDP for VMs running a graphical interface, ssh for others. I also have a UPS to keep everything alive for 6 hours if power goes out, about 20 hours if I shut the desktop down and use a laptop instead.

Re:Learning Lab

[Electricity Likes Me]

Oh it only has the one server in it. It's serving double duty for a file server, an HTPC, network, amp, UPS and some shelving for home routers and stuff. It's just a convenient way to stack all that stuff together and power it.

How are you UPS'ing for 6 hours?

Re:Learning Lab

[ls671]

"How are you UPS'ing for 6 hours?"

Yes, I used to use it as an Internet server with live websites and such on it but I have since moved those to a real data center because bandwidth was cheaper. I used to be able to stay up 48 hours on batteries if I shut down the desktop but I have reduced the number of batteries to half what it used to be after moving to a real data center for live sites that need to be up all the time. I also have a small generator that I can use to recharge the batteries but I usually do not bother now. I have to plug and start the generator manually. The desktop is in another room with electrical wiring running to that room. The desktop uses more power than the server because of the 4 screens and video cards. Nice video cards suck a lot of power. One of the desktop screen is a 50 inches TV not plugged into the UPS circuit. I use a USB extension cord for the wireless dongle that allows me to control the playing on the TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

Same kind of setup in the real data center, one big server running a bunch of qemu VMs with virtual networks separated by firewall rules.

You must still have enough room to hang clothes and what not in your 42u rack then...

Re:Learning Lab

[ls671]

"How are you UPS'ing for 6 hours?"

Sorry I missed the "How" part at first:
Deep cycle motor boat wet batteries coupled to an inverter. Not recommended anywhere for home use but sure cheaper than dry batteries which cost at least twice as much for the same efficiency. I now have two 12 volts batteries and I used to have 4. They are around 100$ a piece and I change them every 6-7 years or so since the power rarely go down around here so they last a long time. Most of the time, they cycle when I simulate a power outage to test the batteries. 1 hour power out test every 2 month and one test until the batteries are drained like once every six months or so.

Use at your own risk, I don't recommend or endorse anything here ;-)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

LOL, Sparc, tanx for the memories

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, Sparc, tanx for the memories

10 Mhz, 1e6 pixels (binary of course), yes, we can run emacs!

Not my cup of tea

[jones_supa]

Maybe as a kid I was fascinated by the idea of having a server or "data center" at home, but these days I would hate to babysit all that trash. Normal networking equipment and a computer or two is enough.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen brother/sister. There's really nothing worse than coming home after a day in the IT mines and dealing with a hard disk that's dying.. The last/best investment in home IT gear was a really good (but cheap) wifi network (Ubiquiti). Everything works *so* much better with good wifi.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[rainmaestro]

I had the same realization a few years ago. Had a rack, plenty of older servers (mostly Sparcs I got free from work when we decommissioned them). All they did was heat up one room and doubled my electric bill. I've become very wary of overprovisioning now, something techies have a bad habit of doing.

A decently-specced laptop for my day-to-day work and a beefier laptop running ESXi to replace the servers (for a home setup, most VMs don't need that much in the way of resources) takes care of most of my needs (ignoring a gaming rig and the requisite consoles). An Asus wireless router running dd-wrt handles all my networking kit needs. Consumes little space, uses far less power and generates no appreciable heat (important in Florida, my A/C bill is high enough as it is).

Re:Not my cup of tea

[dugancent]

You and me both. My datacenter consists of a 4tb HDD plugged into the usb port on my router. Thats it.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[carnivore302]

I understand what you mean. There's some pride when I show friends my setup, and for the most part I'm happy with it. But then something breaks down and it usually takes too much time I don't have to fix it.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[ruir]

Mine is behind a Time Capsule with authentication. I did not plug it on the USB port of the operator router/modem who offers the same service...well, because they could access my files.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

I have one home server that handles backups, remote access to media, VPN access, and other things that I need to keep running constantly. My other computer is a laptop and I go to the field very regularly, so I'd struggle to maintain continuity without the home server. It's just a little ITX Atom with a 2 disk USB RAID box attached.

Everything else on the network is "transient" such as laptops and phones, asides from the Raspberry Pi sitting the living room as a HTPC. If I was to consolidate completely I could move the server to the living room and use that for HTPC, yet despite it being a cool and quiet PC, the RAID box is a loud noisy dog of a thing. Yes, I could turn off the fans and let the disks run hot...not the best strategy.

So I'm now, after years of tinkering an making over provisioning mistakes like the other posters are describing, I'm very happy with my setup and don't imagine changing it at all...until the Atom server dies, or I change the 3TB disks for 6TB disk...but I'm very wary of these helium-filled monsters, so I'm happy to wait until it's all sorted out, probably 2-3 years from now.

PS: Some may be interested to hear that ethernet is really an essential part of my setup. In the first instance, when I leave, or return, from the field, I backup the laptop. Doing this over Gbit is nice. Secondly, I had numerous problems using a USB WiFi dongle on the RPi. Yes, I tried all the options, swapped out the power, used a few different hubs, and tried different dongles. It's still unreliable. Over ethernet it's rock solid, and has the advantage that full-resolution movies can stream effortlessly to the device.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[BringsApples]

Yup. Having a single computer with a hard drive for the OS, and a simple RAID1 with (2) 1TB drives is enough for me. I have all of the music and movies that I want, and still have:

root@server:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2 458G 14G 421G 4% /
/dev/sda1 932G 858G 75G 93% /1t

Re:Not my cup of tea

[BringsApples]

There's some pride when I show friends my setup

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but pride in what? If it takes more time to manage it than it should, what's there to be proud of? Computers are supposed to be about efficiency (uptime included).

Re:Not my cup of tea

[MMC Monster]

Much the same. I have a single NAS in the basement with a backup of the important stuff (documents, photos, mp3s, home videos).

My personal desktop keeps all the movies, etc. All the computers on the network rsync my desktop computer (which is essentially always on).

Re:Not my cup of tea

[WuphonsReach]

Same, I used to have 3-4 servers in the home office, plus multiple desktops.

I now run a single server acting as the firewall, with VMs inside it for dedicated needs, a single laptop and a single desktop. Every few years the server gets a more powerful MB/CPU and double the RAM and larger hard drives. The server has (10) hot-swap 3.5 SAS/SATA bays. Virtualization and cheap RAM is what made the difference.

I also have a 4-bay USB 3.0 external enclosure which holds (4) 3.5 SATA drives which I use for onsite backups.

Anything that I don't need to keep online, gets written out to a pair of USB disk drives, labeled, and stuffed in a drawer.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[pnutjam]

no RAID for me Desktop (server) runs headless, Opensuse. 1 OS HD, 1 Data hard drive, currently 1TB. A third drive is in the case and mounts itself and rsyncs on a weekly basis, This saves me from fat finger mistakes replicating instantly.
I shuffle everything into a crashplan account as an archive.
This is mostly long term storage data, like pictures, music, ebooks that have been organized in a calibre library.

I have multiple laptops, tablets, and phones that the family use.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[Anonymous Coward]

Pride in ability, in knowledge. There is pride in going to the gym too, even though it is more efficient to be a lazy slob. There is pride in being fashion conscious or maintaining an immaculate yard. Pride is rarely about efficiency. I'd much rather hire someone that geeks out about their home network setup than someone that has no pride and only cares about practical matters.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the same thing as the guy with the jacked up truck with stacks. He's not doing anything more with it than a regular driver in a regular car, except make more noise and use more power.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[BringsApples]

Obviously not much pride in your post there, AC.

Re: Not my cup of tea

[Anonymous Coward]

When some problems arise and you have to explain to the proud m*****f***** that you are not satisfied with his work, then u have to deal with someone whose pride you insulted . F*** them .

Re:Not my cup of tea

[Eunuchswear]

Are you using hardware raid? What on earth for.

Re:Not my cup of tea

[Wolfrider]

> a beefier laptop running ESXi to replace the servers

--Mind if I ask what the brand + model is? I've been wanting to do an ESXi box for the last few years on the cheap and just haven't found the right equipment yet. If I could do it used for ~$400 it would be a done deal...

Apple's decently low-power

[dragonworks2050]

I've been using a quad-i7 2012 Mac Mini running VPN with several TB storage on consumer external drives (redundant, of course). Power consumption is relatively minimal for an always-on machine. Now if only they'd ever get around to releasing the Broadwell Mini...

Re:Apple's decently low-power

[Toe, The]

I was going to post roughly the same thing. Data service is not defined by the number of u's. It's by the service you get out of it.

I can't imagine having racks in my house unless my full-time career is intensive hacking. Otherwise, I'm just nerding out, wasting boatloads of power, and filling my house full of noise and heat in order to show chicks how incredibly sexy I am with my racks full of linux boxes and hubs and UPSes and whatnot. Ahem.

A single Mac mini is an amazing home server. It's the hub that my more portable devices check in with or rely on. And it's all I need, and more. It is shitloads more powerful than a rack full of computers I admin'd a decade ago, so why would I need more?

Re:Apple's decently low-power

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen ... same thing, 4 core Mac Mini connected to a USB hub and an HDMI hub with about 10 peripherals including 2 external drives and a dozens of wifi devices served up through it. Amazing little computer.

stuff 4U

[TotalDisdain]

I just have an HP AlphaServer ES47.

IBM bladecenter

[Anonymous Coward]

HS21 bladecenter fully populated with storage module. Picked it up from a company that couldn't pay in cash.

old school

[EthanBernard]

Rolodex 1753, Smith-Corona Super12, roll of stamps.

Mine looks like an ugly hack

[chmod a x mojo]

My personal setup is a frankencenter. I have everything from an old Cyrix300Mhz to a P3 733Mhz HP Netserver to random P4 / Prescotts serving up a combined total of ~12TB + 6TB for desktop / laptop backups. Some of these "machines" are not even in a physical case...

The main trick for the power hungry crap is only keeping what you really need powered on at any time. Most of the old really power hungry stuff is deep cold storage and rarely powered on except to test data integrity. That way I only need to provide cooling ( in the summer at least ) to the P4 / Prescott machines that have the bulk of my more accessed data.

So, all in all it's ugly, hackish - since it is all cobbled together from spare parts from other jobs, and works like a charm.

Rare elements

[Anonymous Coward]

Multiple dual-Itanium servers

Re:Rare elements

[armanox]

Running what though? I'd be interesting in adding Itanium to my collection if I could get an HP Integrity for a very cheap price (currently do not have HP-UX or OpenVMS in my collection - not really interesting in Linux on Itanium)

Re:Rare elements

[Anonymous Coward]

Running RedHat

A small variety

[armanox]

I'm using a Dell Poweredge 2950 as an ESXi server, hosting a couple of VMs. I also have a general purpose Linux server running on an AMD FX 8120 loaded with RAM, SSD, etc; that mainly gets used for BOINC and network services

I've got a few "one-off" boxes in use too - a Sun Netra T1, a Sunblade 1500, an SGI O2 (currently dead) and two SGI Octanes.

Re:A small variety

[armanox]

Add in a PowerMac G5 (Quad-G5) to the list, how could I forget that one?

Home Lab

[Anonymous Coward]

guyed tower for terrestrial wireless Internet (rural USA)
42U rack in detached garage
2 rack servers (4-8 cores with virtualization, 16GB+, 4TB+)
12 strand fiber backbone between garage, house, and tower
1gbps drops to everything

Porn of course.

[Nyder]

I have porn in my home data center. What else would I have in it?

Re:Porn of course.

[RNLockwood]

I have porn in my home data center. What else would I have in it?

Schlock movies and forgettable juvenile music?

Re:Porn of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have porn in my home data center. What else would I have in it?

Your a champ

Re:Porn of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have porn in my home data center. What else would I have in it?

Porn involving Natalie Portman, naked and petrified and covered in hot grits?

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Re:Porn of course.

[guacamole]

Impossible. All my pron can now fit on a portable laptop hard drive. There has gotta be something else.

Re:Porn of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your a champ

You're a kid who can't spell.

Re:Porn of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, either you need to get more pr0n, or we have very different definitions of "a portable laptop hard drive"

simple

[Anonymous Coward]

A broken laptop with a lamp server and owncloud, overheating and dying.

Home network to support a research lab

[Anonymous Coward]

3 zone SPI firewall (Linux homebuild), HP Procurve GB switches. Home network is a managed Ubiquity UniFi wireless system, office network is a wireless network using the same APs but a second SSID, gateway, and DNS. This network has several small servers, including one running Calibre to manage research material. This server is dual homed to the lab network where there are servers not connected to the internet at all.

Yes, this description is incomplete. No, I won't tell you why it is necessary.

Wire Rack of Virtualization!

[muldoonaz]

- Netgear R6300 Router - Cisco DPC3010 Cable Modem - Dell Powerconnect 5424 24-port 1Gb Managed Switch - Synology Diskstation 1813+ 4 x 3TB SATA 2 x 1TB SATA 2 x 128GB SSD - Intel NUC ESXi Management Node 1 x Intel i3-3217U 16GB RAM 128GB SSD - Whitebox ESXi Compute Node 1 x Intel Xeon E3-1220 16GB RAM 8GB USB Storage - Dell R410 ESXi Compute Node (powered off most of the time, its quite noisy) 2 x Intel Xeon L5506 32GB RAM 4 x 1TB SAS - Cyberpower 1350VA 810W UPS

Linux Wiki

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using a 2008 Mac Mini running Lion server to host a Linux Wiki.

Home Office...

[Manuka]

1300VA Smart-UPS, Dell T110, Dell R210, Dell Optiplex 790 (Plex media server), Couple of Dell CS23. Network is Motorola SBR, HP T5740 running pfSense, Aruba IAP-225 (802.11ac), HP 2915 10-port PoE switch, Ubiquiti PicoStation feeding into Ubiquiti toughswitch to remotely connect printer and Ooma for home phone. Office phone is Yealink T38G.

Also have a couple of servers offsite in real datacenters and on EC2 and Azure.

Re:Home Office...

[michrech]

Out of curiosity, if your T110 or R210 are running ESX, XenServer, or any other VM capable host, why don't you put the Plex server in a VM?

Networking guy

[beanpoppa]

I'm a networking guy, so I'm more network-based, than server-based.

Mostly old data-center cast offs-
24U rack (48U cut in half to fit under my plumbing/duct work) in the basement
Cisco 3750-48 PoE Gig switch, providing direct connections to all of my first floor equipment.
Second floor equipment has a direct run to another 3750 switch upstairs. Too hard to run direct lines in an old house.
Bluecoat (nee Packeteer) Packetshaper 7500 for monitoring and QoS on Internet traffic
Cisco MCS 7825 re-purposed back to an HP server, running Ubuntu for any Linux server needs I have. Usually powered off to save power
Netgear WNDR3700 router running DD-WRT
APC AP7801 Managed PDU

Re: Networking guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats on the Packetshaper 7500, great machine! What a lot of fun.

Capital One

[Tablizer]

Same thing that's in my wallet

Not my cup of tea

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen, brother! Also, bmen.

My basement datacenter

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a gigabit of transit from HE.net feeding into my 42U rack.

a pair of dual E5-2620v2s and a dual E5504. Plus various older core2duo type machines.

Most of it is storage, 12x3TB array, 6x3TB array, 12x1TB array, etc.

HP MicroServer

[Anonymous Coward]

HP Microserver + FreeBSD. Does everything I need, quietly, and uses about 35 watts of power.

ultrasparc5..

[Anonymous Coward]

..uptime is over 5 years and i can't bear to turn it off

Re:ultrasparc5..

[Anonymous Coward]

btw, fsck oracle

Phases

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting to see who's still in their honeymoon "ALL THE SERVERS" phase, and who's moved on to cheaper, cooler, less power hungry, more practical solutions.

The moment of clarity for me was when I changed to an ISP that blocked port 25 outbound to anything but their own SMTP server. I started planning out how I'd set up an SMTP relay on my externally hosted VPS, lock it down through measures X Y Z, get reverse DNS set up, bla bla bla. In the end I just migrated to Google Apps, everything about it is easier. By the next week, my rack was reduced from a humming tower of heat to a single Atom D525 system, a Qnap NAS, Airport Extreme, and my cable modem.

Re:Phases

[armanox]

Depends on what it's being used for. My collection, which has a variety of parts (SGI, Sun, PPC, and a virtual x86 env) gets used for testing and learning. I don't buy hardware that I don't have a purpose for anymore - I guess you could call that moving out of the "ALL THE SERVERS" phase. Next things I'd like to add (but not due to cost) would be a recent HP-UX server (I have no issue buying the software from HP, it's the hardware that's expensive) and AIX (once again, recent POWER hardware is more then I'm spending right now). Knowing the UNIX families well translates to money in the bank (the Sun stuff certainly does, and I've seen postings for good money doing AIX. I know a few places that are still using IRIX, would love to see one of them put a posting up).

I've also contributed patches to open source projects based on testing against some of the hardware I have access to

Re:Phases

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Apps

From an all-the-servers honeymoon to a codependent relationship in the cloud?

Re:Phases

[Anonymous Coward]

y'aint foolin'. The *used* IA64 integrity 1U and 2Us start around a grand, and the cheapest I've seen a C3000 + single itanium blade go is ~1500.

Re:Phases

[Anonymous Coward]

Incidentally, if you do end up picking up a HP-UX itanium blade, it'd make me amazingly happy if you figured out how to patch gnu's ld to work for hpux-ia64 targets. Stupid hp ld doesn't run on anything else which means crosscompile with static code analysis tools that would work simply don't.

Gave up on rack-mount servers

[EvilSS]

I ditched my rack mount servers when I came home one February when it was 20F outside and my AC was running. Just not worth the cost of operating them! I culled my equipment down to a pair of T110 quad core Xeon (with HT) Dell pedestal servers, and a build-from-scratch file server with eight 3TB drives, cheap AMD proc, mobo, and all with 16GB RAM. Drastically lower power consumption than my old setup (4 HP DL585 G1's) and more powerful as well. The T110's are setup to allow me to swap out the boot drives to change hypervisors in and out. They have dedicated 1 gig storage networks back to the file server where the vdisks for the VMs all live. Between the two I can run Xen, VMWare, or Hyper-V (my work requires me to work with all three) and on those I can run pretty much anything I need. I have some Cisco gear for when I need to play with it but for the most part those stay unpowered. I can simulate most of the networking for testing.

Other than that there is a pair of 8 port gigabit switches, router running Tomato Shibby, cable modem, Silicon Dust OTA networked TV tuner, and a wireless access point in the center of the house for phones/tablets. All living on a 4 shelf bread rack in my office.

32 tb 1000+ movies

[Anonymous Coward]

and no, thats not a pr0n collection.

Re:32 tb 1000+ movies

[FlyHelicopters]

Perhaps not, but what a waste...

There is this thing called Netflix and Amazon Video. :)

I used to do all that, until I discovered that my time had more value than the cost of the movies.

Re:32 tb 1000+ movies

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the movies. I have a similar setup, and much of my cherished collection is not available on netflix or amazone prime.

Re:32 tb 1000+ movies

[michrech]

In addition to the AC that replied to you, some of us have ISP's that frown on lots of monthly bandwidth use. It's much better to download a movie once then watch it as many times as you want (especially for those with children), than to keep streaming it from the internet, for those of us with stingy ISPs.. ;)

Re:32 tb 1000+ movies

[FlyHelicopters]

That is a fair point.

I will say, that has to change for the online streaming business to work.

Why I want ethernet to every room

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't answer for him, but I can give you my reasons for wanting to run ethernet to every room. I'm not done yet, but I'm actively doing it as I update rooms.

Some context, I have 3 kids, a wife, and me (and two set of grandparents who visit for about a month of two each year (in total, not all at once) with their iPads, Android devices, etc). And, truthfully, wi-fi does work for all of us, but most of the kids have a computer sitting at a desk, why do they need wi-fi for machines that are just sitting there anyways?

That said, here is the list of reasons I want ethernet in every room:

First, bandwidth sharing, wi-fi is fast, but not that fast, especially when we have six tablets using it at the same time as all the computers... offloading the computers from the wi-fi will solve a lot of bandwidth issues for the tablets (I'm always surprised watching the kids use a laptop and a tablet (or two) simultaneously... considering their next toy will probably be Android Phones... well... it just keeps adding demand to the wi-fi resources).
Second, security, yes, I know it sounds old fashion, but I've already replaced two wi-fi routers because they stopped supporting the latest security (remember WEP versus WPA)... when a new exploit or attack comes out I like the option of shutting the wi-fi down to analyse it (that's more a personal interest, but still, the family can't be without internet while I tinker).
Third, dead spots, I have one bedroom that wi-fi just will not work in, and I don't have a clue why either. The room faces the coldest winds during Winter and was the original master bedroom so my guess is that it was "extra" insulated when the last owners did some work there, but I need to do some investigation into why they would have insulated or used something on the inside walls versus all the other bedrooms (4 on that floor, wi-fi from any of the 3 works to the other 3).
Fourth, coverage, right now I use two Wi-fi's, one in the upper floor and one in the basement which gives fairly good coverage of the house, but with wired connections I can spread that coverage even better (in particular I have wi-fi's that can let me limit their strength so I could then have 3 or 4 wi-fi routers and keep their strength low so that I can keep it within the house itself and not blast good strength across the street while still having a dead-spot in my own house).
Fifth, internet-of-things, I'm not that into it right now, but more and more devices are going to require/use internet connectivity, again, most of those devices will be stationary (think Blu-Ray player, game box, TVs, fridge, stove, stereo, alarm clock), each may only take a small amount of connectivity, but all those pings, traces, network checks and handshakes are going to saturate any wi-fi in the long run (I can do it now with 10-12 devices so can see the writing on the wall when we are at 30-50 devices).
Sixth, guaranteed uptime and reliability, I keep my wi-fi routers on a remote on/off switch so I can turn them off and on again from whereever I happen to be sitting, I use it about once a month to reset the wi-fi routers (I've replaced some routers that had to be reset daily!) , but I have never (ok, maybe yearly since we loose power at least once a year) had to reset my switches. I think for internet-of-things, having intermittent network connectivity issues will be a huge problem, wi-fi routers are flaky compared to wire and non-router based switches in this regard. Additionally, I have servers to host data and files for all the devices, if I plug it into one router and that router happens to go down, well, everyone looses access, while if the wi-fi routers each connect directly to the switch which has the servers then my kids can just move to another room or change their access point (if it doesn't do it automatically for them -- sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, depends on the fault with the Router) and everything continues to work :)

Hope that helps answer the question. note that I would never get rid of wi-fi, but I can definitey justify running ethernet to every room :)

Re:Why I want ethernet to every room

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have 6 tablets at home, you have much bigger problems (in your head). Keep going, lets implode this shitty world as fast as we can!

Re:Why I want ethernet to every room

[Anonymous Coward]

With 802.11ac most of these aren't really a concern. And take a look at Ubiquiti WiFi for dealing with deadspots. Extremely inexpensive, great stuff.

Home Office Server

[Anonymous Coward]

It has changed over the years but currently its a first generation i7 with 16 GB of RAM running Mint Linux LTS. I'm running ZFS on Linux with four 2TB and two 1TB SATA drives. A couple years ago I had this hardware in an old case (circa 2000) and I decided it was too loud for my home office. I bought a new case that would support 120mm and 140mm fans and a bottom mount power supply. I also bought a water cooler system and use fancontrol to only run the cpu fan when necessary. Finally I use CrashPlan with my own encryption key to backup the ZFS RAID contents to the cloud.

Overall, things are quite stable and quiet. I can basically move my ZFS drives into a new system (controller independent) and import them. I can grow the ZFS filesystem (using pairs of drives) as I get new drives AND I have redundancy. Power is nominal since its a single PC vs a rack of systems. This system also runs a number of other services like Samba, SSH, SVN, Plex, etc etc etc

Eventually I may migrate the ZFS drives into a dedicated lower powered RAID system but for right now my solution is working OK for me and isn't too power hungry.

Re:Home Office Server

[Blaskowicz]

This sounds like it was easy, compared to how it should have been. No need to learn BSD, afterall? (nor a "pro" distro like Red Hat / CentOS which I guess would be about the same work, moving from Ubuntu)
plus a standard tower case still is the easiest system to work on, including for getting hard drives in and out of it.

Welcome to Project Treasure Map

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, here is a complete inventory of my wares, oh warriors of the Fatherland.
Or NOT.

Low power infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

For 10+ years my firewall was a retired gaming PC with a few extra NIC's slapped in. I eventually (*cough*) did the math, and it was a lot cheaper to just spring for a low power machine than to pay to run the old gaming PC for firewalling. I did a ton of research and eventually wound up with a Soekris (the one I picked has a nice little Intel Atom board with 4 gigabit ethernet ports). It has no video hardware, so you need to do initial OS installation via serial console, which was a fun blast to the past for me. The only downtimes it's ever had were power outages and OpenBSD upgrades.

For years I also had a retired gaming PC driving my wife's movie TV. Now it's being driven by a modified Raspberry Pi running RaspBMC, which took the power usage from about 175w playing a movie to about 7w playing a movie (both numbers exclude the TV). This upgrade cost about $50 total. If you want to try this, I strongly suggest that you heatsink every component on the board. I personally cut up a big aluminum CPU heatsink with a jigsaw and glued the custom-sized bits on with Arctic Silver thermal adhesive. You will also need to spring for at least a 2A power supply; my little Pi was pretty unstable with a 1A power supply once I overclocked it it the level that it lives at now.

I also use one Pi (just overclocked to 900, no special heatsinking) for a streaming camera server, and one for a general-purpose messing about box (this one does my webserver, a slightly modified CircleMUD, and whatever else I'm messing about with).

Infrastructure-wise, I just run 3 low power desktop gigabit switches (a LAN switch, a WAN switch, and a DMZ switch), all of which connect their respective devices to the little Soekris box, which does its firewally routey thing and sorts all the packets out. The WAN switch is plugged into a WAP running dd-wrt AP-only.

My main PC is still a giant dinosaur, but if you want to play high end games, you are kind of stuck with that.

Avoid enterprise hardware

[LaZZaR]

2x Shuttle XPC running vCentre
QNAP NAS for shared storage and media server
Cisco 857w
Generic gigabit switch
Linksys VOIP gateway
Small UPS

This sits behind the glass door of a nice oak AV cabinet in the living room, and I have a couple of 120mm PC fans in the back of it to circulate air. Reasonably cheap, no noise, easy on the power, and ok with the wife since I don't have an ugly rack of equipment sitting in the corner. Excepting for upgrades/reworks, this is more or less the setup I've run for the last 7 or 8 years.

Rest of house runs combination of Wifi & Ethernet. An additional Shuttle XPC sits in the shed as my "offsite" backup repository.

These days, I like to leave work at work.

[RandomUsername99]

2 Laptops: one for me and a MacBook for the girlfriend's design work. I have to deal with big hardware enough at work, and a beefy VPS instance for personal projects and random freelance necessities is more than enough for me. I used to have a bunch of hardware, but that's not where I'm at right now.

Nothing!

[gnu-sucks]

Except for a flash drive in a router. I guess these days internet hosting and connection speeds have become so much more affordable and overall better that it doesn't make sense to archive the world at your house.

A few years back it was a different story:
SGI Challenge 12 CPU IRIX machine
Sun UltraSPARC
K6-2/500 with Debian Linux (or FreeBSD, depends on what year)
P3-? with NetBSD
Plus probably 5-6 random computers.. iMac here, dell there, etc.

Supermicro

[somenickname]

I've got a 36U StarTech rack full of Supermicro chassis/motherboards and miscellaneous other things (Cisco switch, KVM, monitor, etc). The initial cost was pretty expensive but, the rack will last forever and the chassis will be useful until the SAS backplanes start to fail. In total the rack has around 100GB of RAM, 40TB of disk and around 30 cores of varying capability (everything from Intel Atom to Intel Xeon X56xx) and a lot of UPS (rack stays up for 1.5 hours without power). It's been up for a few years now and, though it's crazy stable, I do have some observations about a "home datacenter":

The rack sits in a 100sqft room on the main floor of my house and it presents some challenges: 1) A 100sqft room is likely to have a 15 amp breaker. The machines in my rack are all pretty power efficient (500W at idle) so, I'm not regularly bumping up against the 80% load of a 15 amp breaker but, it's something to consider. 2) Cooling. It can be a gigantic pain in the ass to keep the room at a sane temperature. In the summer, I have to open up the window and put a window fan in it. In Spring/Autumn, I generally monitor the drive temps and open/close windows as needed. In winter, I could open the server room door to heat the house except: 3) It's loud. Like, really loud. I've replaced all the power supplies in the big servers (which all have redundant power supplies) with super-duper-platinum-efficient power supplies and, it made it a huge difference but, it's still very, very loud. I bought a solid core door for the server room and put audiophile type sound absorbers in the room. It's still loud.

Apart from those 3 things, having a nearly-enterprise level rack in your home is doable. It's a lot of upfront money and work but, once it's all in place, it's pretty easy to maintain.

Re:Supermicro

[DeathElk]

Hmmm, unless you have an enterprise at home, all the enterprise grade gear is doing is costing you money. Mac mini, small mirrored 4TB NAS backing up to bus powered USB drives, FritzBox AP/Router/DECT. Super cheap to run, more than enough storage and grunt for the five of us.

I used to have a data center

[msobkow]

At one point I had 5 machines all networked together, but nowadays you can get enough memory and CPU to install six different database servers on a laptop, so I'm down to one machine. I did have two, but my Linux box recently decided to go tits up so I've shifted everything to my WIndblows 7 laptop instead. Someday I'll buy another box for Linux, but it'll be a long time before I can save enough to buy a new machine -- I have other things that need buying first, and I'm on a disability budget nowadays.

Ah, how I miss the glory days of big-dollar contracting and being able to buy a machine with a bi-weekly paycheque without flinching. :)

Why do this?

[aussersterne]

I sort of don't get it. White box PCs with many cores, dozens of gigabytes of RAM, and multiple gigabit ethernet ports cost next to nothing these days with a few parts from Amazon.com. If the goal is just to play with powerful hardware, you could assemble one or a few white box PCs with *many* cores at 4+ GHz, *tons* of RAM, gigabit I/O, and dozens or hundreds of terabytes of online RAID storage for just a few thousand, and plug them straight into the wall and get better computation and frankly perhaps even I/O performance to boot, depending on the age of the rackware in question.

If you're really doing some crazy hobby experimenting or using massive data storage, you can build it out in nicer, newer ways that use far less (and more readily available) power, are far quieter, generate far less heat, don't take up nearly the space, and don't have the ugliness or premium cost spare parts of the kinds of gear being discussed here. If you need the features, you can easily get VMware and run multiple virtual machines. 100Mbps fiber and Gigabit fiber are becoming more common and are easy to saturate with today's commodity hardware. There are an embarrassment of enterprise-ready operating systems in the FOSS space.

If you really need high reliability/high availability and performance guarantees, I don't get why you wouldn't just provision some service for yourself at Amazon or somewhere else and do what you need to do. Most SaaS and PaaS companies are moving away from trying to maintain their own datacenters because it's not cost effective and it's a PITA—they'd rather leave it to specialists and *really big* data centers.

Why go the opposite direction, even if for some reason you really do have the need for those particular properties?

Re:Why do this?

[Bing Tsher E]

The dude with a 1959 Corvette could sell it to a scrap yard (or donate it to Goodwill) and just watch videos of people driving, washing, and doing oil changes on 1959 Corvettes.

Re:Why do this?

[goarilla]

Why go the opposite direction, even if for some reason you really do have the need for those particular properties?

Control, and for some me included maintaining home storage is a hobby.
Some are also skeptical about putting some or all of their eggs in the hands of a corporate service provider.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I went with a big super micro workstation that has tons of RAM. I run ESXi on that, then many VMs inside of it. Normally it's consuming about 50 watts of power. I need lots of RAM more than fast CPUs. I exactly don't want tons of noisy power hungry low spec hardware even if several racks of blinking lights looks impressive. So for my all-in-one box solution is meeting my needs and I'm very happy with the results. Capable, quiet, low power consumption, mostly out of the way shoved in a corner...

Re:Why do this?

[DerekLyons]

Why go the opposite direction, even if for some reason you really do have the need for those particular properties?

Because for any given hobby... there's always going to be someone out at the end of the bell curve. The photographer with $190k worth of gear who drives a $500 car and lives in a $5k house. The model train enthusiast who builds a 2500sqft house around his 1800sqft train layout. The IT geek with enough horsepower in his basement to run a decent sized ISP.. They're all birds of a feather.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I actually know the first two examples personally.)

Home Built

[tquasar]

I bought my son a Compaq and he used it until he realized he needed something better. Bryan was a gamer and needed to keep up with his friends and enemies, so when he was about thirteen he bought all the stuff to build a powerful gaming rig. My only contribution was Visa. He assembled the thing in a day and then spent hours finding software to install and doing the set up work. So, then I thought that I need a new PC so we ordered all the same components and he built one for me. I still have a GIGANTIC Antec case on my desk.

So much power waste

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

If you look closely at those pictures, in pretty much every rack there are redundant switches with absolutely nothing connected to them, yet they are powered on.

Really? Do you like the blinking lights? I measured my 24 port 3com superstack switch and it was 50 watts. I switched to a 8 port low power gigabit (i have 6 devices these days) and it runs at 8watts.

Calculating the cost savings of the switch, at .07 cents a kwh, 42w = cost per year savings of 25 dollars. Roughly the cost of the gigabit switch i replaced it with!

Re:So much power waste

[FireFury03]

If you look closely at those pictures, in pretty much every rack there are redundant switches with absolutely nothing connected to them, yet they are powered on.

Really? Do you like the blinking lights? I measured my 24 port 3com superstack switch and it was 50 watts. I switched to a 8 port low power gigabit (i have 6 devices these days) and it runs at 8watts.

Calculating the cost savings of the switch, at .07 cents a kwh, 42w = cost per year savings of 25 dollars. Roughly the cost of the gigabit switch i replaced it with!

Yep, managed switches seem to be outrageously power hungry. In my cabinet I've got:
  - Satellite patch panel (wired to the dish)
  - 24 port 8p8c patch panel (wired to sockets in the rest of the house/office)
  - 24 port managed gigabit switch
  - Test machine which is completely underpowered and never turned on (at some point I'll get around to removing it from the cabinet)
  - Sheevaplug
  - USB hard drive for Sheevaplug
  - VDSL modem
  - VoIP/POTS gateway
  - USB DVB-S2 receiver
  - RIPE Atlas probe
  - PoE injectors for 2 wireless APs that are dotted around the house
  - Far too many PSUs for all of the above! (Although I have consolidated all the 12v supplies into a single PSU with multiple connectors. I've still got stuff that needs 9v and 5v supplies though)

The total draw is about 90 watts, probably about 50% of it going to the managed switch! About 25% goes to the hard drive I guess.

If anyone has any recommendations for 24 port managed switches that don't draw silly amounts of power when idle, I'd be interested (bonus points if they have some PoE ports).

The other problem I have is that no devices seem to be able to roam between APs sensibly - if I move from the house to the office my phone and laptop try to hold onto the incredibly weak signal from the house AP even though there's an AP in the office for them to use. I have to toggle the wifi off and on again to get them to reassociate. (And vice-versa when I move back into the house).

No datacenter. Just a desktop computer

[aussersterne]

with 20 cores, 128GB RAM, 48TB online storage, and gigabit fiber coming in.

Yes, I use all of it, for work. But it's definitely not a "data center." These days, I don't know why anyone would want one—even moderately sized enterprises are increasingly happy to pay someone else to own the data center. Seems nuts to me to try to bring it into your basement.

If you just need the computation and/or the storage, desktops these days run circles around the datacenter hardware from just a few years ago. If you need more than that, it's more cost effective and reliable to buy into someone-or-other's cloud.

Re:No datacenter. Just a desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I generally agree with you, and have a similar setup (desktop isn't as beefy, but also have a beefy home server w/ similar specs running VMs) - some things can't be done on data-centers.

my home server is 24 cores, 128GB of ram, and it's performance is the limiting factor of my productivity.

HOWEVER, I have a bit shy of 200TB of static (mostly) online storage - and another 29-30TB of very mutable storage (changes to at least 30-40% of it every 3-4 days, sometimes more - plus slow growth (1-2GB a week)).

It's simply not financially feasible for me to store that 200TB on something like AWS (which would cost $20,000/month or more) - plus 30-40TB/month in bandwidth costs (I can't afford that from my fibre connection, it'd cost more than the AWS storage) - when all up it cost me a little shy of 25k to own said storage myself (including tape for backup), plus $150-ish a month in electricity.

I imagine on a corporate scale, it only explodes even more. If you're working with big data, thirdparty data centers simply aren't cost effective.

Re:No datacenter. Just a desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

The only advantage is that if I break into your home I'm going to tuck that PC of yours under one arm (I'm 250+ lb) and walk away with it.

At the very least, for home backups, some kind of home server can be locked in a server closet out of sight and could potentially survive a home invasion.

(But you still need offsite backups anyway)

Re:No datacenter. Just a desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems nuts to me to try to bring it into your basement.

Until your fiber drops out in the middle of a project worth 10's of 1000's and you are running on tight schedules, having your server in your basement starts looking really good. My un-insurable work data will alway be located on hardware I own as well as offsite.

To misquote Han Solo:
Fancy connections and 3rd party contracts are no match for a good server in your basement.

Re:No datacenter. Just a desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of curiosity, wtf requires 200TB of storage?

Re:No datacenter. Just a desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

State of the art machine learning work. The kind of AI that you can literally have conversations with, or can throw an image/video/camera at and it can literally identify arbitary objects and make observations / reason about the state of a scene, etc.

Re:No datacenter. Just a desktop computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the guy who posted, but I have about 80TB of storage at home I used for academic research related to remote sensing (satellite imagery).

Running a study over environmental changes over the east coast of AU over the past two decades w/ MODIS/VIIRS/Landsat5 imagery.

200TB is tiny, CSIRO/GA/BoM/etc do similar studies AU-wide and easily have 2-3PB of 'source' data alone from 5-6 different satellites combined over variosu projects, that's not including the derived products which are often 3-4x the size of the source data.

Cool and Efficient

[Foresto]

I have a low power NAS box with a large hard drive. I replaced the stock firmware with debian. It serves all my shared files (linux ISOs, music, etc.) and runs all my network services (CalDAV, CardDAV, etc.). I periodically run backups to an external drive, which remains powered down and disconnected most of the time, and can be swapped with an off-site backup drive.

Gigabit ethernet connects all my stationary computers and phones. An old wifi base station connects the mobile devices. A wired-only router sits between my LAN and my modem.

I outgrew the desire for lots of computers and big network hardware long ago. That stuff just takes up space, wastes power, and generates heat. I get much more satisfaction from cool, quiet, efficient systems nowadays.

Small to medium setup

[Anonymous Coward]

42u rack in cellar
1) 10 port Cisco gigabit switch
2) 11Tb- (currently) linux file server (entertainment storage, data archives, personal shared folders for family, photo/video storage) Homebuilt 4u

3) 2u Testing/dev server. Currently not in regular use

4) Apple XServe 1.1 Game Server running Ubuntu LTS 14.04
5) Apple XServer 1.1 Web Server (4 sites) running Ubuntu LTS 14.04. Also controls Apple RAID
6) Apple RAID with 4.5Tb (redundant storage for critical files)
7) 1500 watt UPS for critical systems
8) Rack shelf with monitor and KVM in case local management is required.

Other Infrastructure:
7) Gigabit router (with 4 port gb switch and wifi) for WAN link - my office
8) wifi router with 10/100 switch in tv room
9) wifi router with 10/100 switch in 2nd office
10) 3 gigabit switches at strategic locations
11) 3 Desktops
12) 5 laptops
13) 3 tablets
14) 2 smart phones
15) security cameras
16) Various other computers and embedded devices as work demands
17) An old ppc iLamp running linux (photo display.)

Wifi works throughout the house and back yard but all three APs are required for this.
Everything important has gigabit but for those who use wifi- 10/100 is good enough. (Wifi sucks.)
The Apple hardware was given to me- never would have paid the money but it was fun getting a decent operating system installed on the XServes.

All the important stuff runs various flavors of linux, of course, but there are 4 windows machines, a Mac and an iPad.

hinv

[Anonymous Coward]

Where to start? In no particular order:

1) SCS GigaBooster (7x 233mhx DEC Alpha 21066, 1GB RAM)

This is pretty much the crown jewel of my collection. It's a cluster of DEC Alpha computers built around a custom chassis and logic board manufactured by Supercomputing Systems in Switzerland. It runs Ultrix across all the internal elements bootstrapped from the primary node. The entire thing is wrapped up in a gorgeous case painted fire engine red with two curved side panels. It's one of those systems people always ask about when they see it.

2) Parsytec x'Plorer (16x T805 30mhz Transputer, 16x 4M RAM)

Runner up for my most prized system. The case on this thing is absolutely insane to look at. Boots HeliOS, a variant of Unix designed for Transputers. I've never opened mine up, but I'm told that the system is basically a single board from a larger Transputer based supercomputer stuffed inside a desk side chassis.

3) NeXT Cube (33mhz 68040, 64MB, 1x Next Dimension, 2x IRCAM IPSW)

Mostly own this system for the IRCAM IPSW boards. They're custom i860 based DSP synths that interface with a customized version of MAX called MAX/FTS. Still works, and I still use it occasionally when I'm messing around with music stuff. As far as I know this may be the only installation left that actually operates. I know a few other folks who have the IRCAM boards, but not many of them have the software and even fewer actually use the setup to do anything.

4) IBM S/390 Multiprise 3000 (2x CPUs, 4GB main storage, 16x 18GB SSA drives)

A desk side IBM mainframe that boots OS/390 (and apparently Linux, but I haven't tried). I both fucking love and hate this machine- it's an absolute blast to operate and fiddle around with OS/390, but the storage subsystem is an unbelievable pain in the ass to maintain and there's always the danger of screwing up the emulated 3380/3390 stuff, which is virtually impossible to recover without assistance from IBM. It's not too bad on the power consumption but loud as fuck- there's twin turbines inside the thing with their own speed controllers that rev up the moment you IPL the machine.

5) SGI Tezro (4x1ghz, 4GB RAM, V12)

A nice MIPS box. Boots IRIX. Awesome case design. Not much else to say about it, it shares a lot of internal design with the SGI rack mount systems. A bit noisy in use, but otherwise it works fine.

6) SGI Octane 2 (2x600mhz, 4GB RAM, dual V12 + 2x DCD, PCI shoebox)

Another nice MIPS box from SGI. I kinda like the modular design of the Octane 2 over the Tezro. Everything disassembles so neat and cleanly, even if the backplane connectors are a PITA (not that I disassemble the machine very often, but when I do clean it out, I'm always amazed at the ingenuity behind it).

7) Omron Luna 88k2 (4x88K 33mhz Motorola processors, 64MB RAM)

Weird fucking box from a Japanese company long ago. Yeah, that's 88k- not 68k. It boots a variant of Mach OS. Been trying to find some tapes for this thing (found some that were mechanically compatible, but the drive wouldn't read or write to them- it's possible the drive is busted) so I can back it up and chuck one of the BSDs on it, just so I can actually compile some more modern software on the thing and use it for something.

8) Symbolics 3620 (PE36 console, LGP2 printer)

Surprisingly, I actually still use this box on occasion for something other then "watching it boot up". I was able to track down a copy of S-Graphics for it, so it'll do some really retro and rudimentary 3D graphics. I recently built a retro iOS game using graphics exclusively rendered from this box. They weren't pretty, but they've got a certain vibe to them that you can't get from modern day 3D packages like Maya or 3DS.

9) MacIvory III (running on a Quadra 950)

Another psuedo-LISP machine. Basically, the MacIvory is a NuBus board set that runs a full fledged LISP installation on it, with the GUI being displayed via Mac OS. There is absolutely nothing remarkable worth mentioning about the host compute

What for?

[Anonymous Coward]

All my servers are at a real data center... How much power do you all use? Jesus man. Some of these posts just sound wasteful...

I have a cable modem, airport extreme w/ a 5tb hdd, a few phones, a couple tablets and a couple notebooks... In a house of five people... No racks full of old power hungry servers from the 80's, desks with 30 monitors, stacks of gigabit switches, and useless fiber all over the place...

Home lab/server

[RobbieCrash]

I've got a Dell T410 I bought second hand. I've got 6x1TB WD Black SATA drives attached to a PERC5 in RAID 6. It's got 48GB of RAM and dual Xeon E5504s. It's running Hyper-V 2012R2, and hosts my MS home lab for testing, licensed through the now defunct Technet program. The MS lab is all 2012R2 and consists of an Exchange 2013 server, 2 DCs, and a CA. I use this mostly for testing stuff I'm going to do at work, as well as learning Windows garbage I wouldn't normally get to.

I've also got 8 Linux VMs running on it. 6 are running Ubuntu 14.04, one is running Debian Wheezy and one is running Debian Sid. The 6 Ubuntu boxes run my internet based PVR so that I don't have to deal with building a proper PVR to record my totally current active cable service; internet based Blu-Ray ripper so that I don't have to actually rip the discs I buy all the time; Plex Media Server to connect the aforementioned backups to my Chromecast/mobile devices/whatever; SABNzb to actually perform the backups; a custom WordPress installation running SupportPress so that my wife and roommate can submit tickets to remind me to fix the Roomba; a BitTorrent Sync box so that I don't need to deal with Dropbox. The Wheezy box is a Sendmail server for sending mail and the Sid box is one that I use to mess around with and test Linux compatibility with some Python stuff I have.

I've got a file server which has been running OpenIndiana, but I had to move that back to Ubuntu because OI doesn't currently support my motherboard. It's got an 80GB Intel 520 SSD as the OS drive, and a janky ZFS setup which works well enough for home use. The zpools are setup across 3 RAIDZ pools, each cnsists of a 4x1TB, 4x2TB or 4x3TB RAIDZ array. Each array also has a 20GB slice of a 120GB Vertex 3 as cache drives, with the last slice going to the smallest zpool as a slog. The smallest zpool gets the slog since it's running dedup as it houses backups for the Hyper-V box, my desktop and laptop and my wife and roommate's computers. It's got an i3 and 32GB of ECC RAM.

I'm currently in the process of waiting for a server to configure off-site replication of all my important/irreplaceable data to a hosted server through So You Start, formerly OVH. $42 a month for 2TB of off-site storage seems like a pretty great deal to me. It'll be running FreeBSD I suppose, since they don't offer Solaris.

low power / open source

[Anonymous Coward]

a cheap raid 1 nas and 3 intel nuc's running ovirt is actually about as close to a real data center as i have ever been. And consumes about 100watts.

Down to two servers...

[mad-seumas]

I used to run a whole pile of servers, from DEC alphas to various Ultrasparcs to Linux servers.... now I'm down to a single ZFS-on-linux SAN server and a Supermicro chassis that has two dual-quad motherboards with 32GB of RAM each running a pair of Xen hypervisors. In my home lab I can fire up VMs left and right to test whatever I need to before I bring it to a client and play with my own projects at the same time. The important stuff I have runs in a datacenter but it's been great having such a flexible home lab. The only downside is the Supermicro is LOUD due to all of it's tiny little high-speed fans so I've had to baffle it with various home-made contraptions to keep it from sounding like a jet.

I can't be the only one

[slashmydots]

What the hell do I need a home datacenter for? I have a PC with 3 hard drives, a TV tuner card, dual monitors, a projector, and a tablet. Why would I get a datacenter server, just to have one? Because I like the sound of 50dB fans? Because I don't know how to fit 3 hard drives in an ATX desktop case? I don't even have a server at my computer repair business. My "servers" are my mirrored 64GB flash drives and my point of sale laptop.

Re:I can't be the only one

[SecurityGuy]

You're not the only one. I looked at this article and thought "You don't have a home datacenter. If you think you do, you don't know what a datacenter is."

HP Prolient Microserver (gen 7)

[Anonymous Coward]

I picked one up for 160€! with 4Gb ram! Incredible machine for the price!

My config: 3 2TB drive in raid 5 for data, 300GB drive for the OS + DVD.
Since build in video is only VGA (???) and there is no sound, I added 1 fanless Video card + 1 sound card + 1 8" touch screen and a small wireless keyboard/universal remote control (http://riitek.en.made-in-china.com/product/JoaQSbvjZXpc/China-RII-Mini-I6-2ND-Belgium-Layout-2-4GHz-Wireless-Keyboard-Universal-Remote-Control-2-in-1.html)

This allows me to control the PC from the touchscreen, use it as a video/sound source (with projector + hifi), and store 4TB of data for the whole familly.

The unit is very quiet, has 6 external USB slots (2 are in use for wireless keyboard + touchscreen), 1 ESATA plus one internal USB slot if you want to run a linux of some type from a stick...
It has 4 removeable disk slots and a very professionally designed case/PCB, realy a little marvel for the price and perfectly capable of covering 'normal' household needs.

Cyrille

Don't give-up the rack

[Wrexs0ul]

Only one proper server running ESXi, but the rest is all rack-mountable:

- Unraid server (bought their premade)
- Dell 2950 that's been decommissioned from the DC
- 24 port Gig switch
- 24 port Gig PoE switch for our phones
- TV streaming head-end. 3 Cable boxes on shelves
- Control4 main server and amp, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Would just get the amp and an open source streaming box in the future
- Modem and router

Only addition will be UPS at some point. It's only half a rack, but being able to lock it and run cables through the top means the kids have zero ability to go after what's inside. I do some software development from home so it's a nice setup for days when sweat pants trumps suits :)

We're talking old rack gear here.

[aussersterne]

This isn't about a 1959 Corvette. It's about a 1959 garbage truck.

Re:We're talking old rack gear here.

[MrNiceguy_KS]

This isn't about a 1959 Corvette. It's about a 1959 garbage truck.

Different people like different things. A lot of people develop true passion for the work they do, and it bleeds into their hobbies. I've lived my entire life in agricultural areas, and I've known a lot of people, including my father, who restore antique tractors as a hobby. I've been to car shows where I've seen antique school buses, semi trucks, and tow trucks that have been painstakingly restored. They tended to attract a lot more people than the rows and rows of Camaros and Mustangs. Never seen a garbage truck at a car show, but I'm sure someone's got one out there.

A few years ago, one of the long-time groundskeepers retired from my employer. At the same time, the company retired the 1970's era Cushman he'd been using, and he bought it with plans on a full restoration.

Re:We're talking old rack gear here.

[Bing Tsher E]

I have an old tube-era rackmount Tek oscilloscope. It isn't one of the 'sexy' 547s but I like having it.

  I also have a first generation IBM Power deskside system. No video card, just a serial console cable. It has the Power 1 chipset on one of the NuBus cards. I was able to install a fresh copy of AIX on it using the serial console and an external cdrom drive. It's just an ugly beige case on the outside but by now it's pretty close to unique.

Re:We're talking old rack gear here.

[Eunuchswear]

This isn't about a 1959 Corvette. It's about a 1959 garbage truck.

That would be cool.

This is only a '63, but look at it: http://www.refusetruckphotography.com/keyword/1959/

Needs a little work, but...

Not as much as it used to...

[FlyHelicopters]

Frankly, I setup my home 8 years ago (when I bought it) with a server room in one of the upstairs closets, had the whole house wired with Cat 6, got a 24 port hub, setup a server in a very large case with 24 1TB hard drives (those were expensive back then), and went to town.

Over the next few years, those drives were replaced with 1.5TB, then 2TB, then finally 3TB drives...

I had a second machine in place when the Core i7 920 came out and used that to rip DVD and Blu-Ray discs using AnyDVD to crack them so they could be served.

I had a computer on every TV in the house (all 4 of them) and was going to town...

Until one day, I discovered I was spending more money and time than just BUYING THE MOVIES WOULD COST.

Yea, nuts...

So I ditched all that, deleted a LOT of hard work over the years, and now buy all my movies via Amazon Instant Video.

Why? Because the quality is nice, the convince is easy, and I now have more time to play with the family.

Of course, 8 years ago, the streaming video options were not as good as they are today, which is why I set it up in the first place.

But frankly, it was a huge waste of time and money.

Today I have nothing in the server closet, other than the 24 port hub, my main desktop downstairs now has four 4TB drives that store eveything I care about and 2 external 3TB drives backup the critical stuff.

Two different online services (Crashplan and Backblaze) back everything in the house up offsite), and I also keep a copy of the most critical stuff (family documents, pictures, and videos), on OneDrive.

My wife's computer in her office has a copy of all that as well, and her documents, and of course they are all networked.

The computers at every TV? Gone... replaced first with Roku devices, now replaced with Amazon Fire TV devices.

Life has become much simpler, I have more free time, my electric bill is much lower, and frankly, I spend less money buying movies than I ever saved "ripping them".

Re:Not as much as it used to...

[Maxwell]

Similar experience here. You are now a service provider for your family. Reliability, ease of use are more important than bragging rights. I am down to a single xeon server, serviio, 24g, 8tb. PS3 as media player and servio handles the transcoding for phones and tablets. Kids can watch their movies, we can listen to music, watch movies.

Yup.

[aussersterne]

Same conclusion. It's too easy to feel that precarity from the early computing age (not enough storage! not enough cycles! data versions of things are special!) if you were there. I think there's some of that going on here on Slashdot a lot of the time.

People in love with old Unix boxen or supercomputer hardware. People that maintain their own libraries of video, but all that's stored there is mass-market entertainment. And so on. It's like newspaper hoarding.

Storage and computation are now exceedingly cheap. 8-bay eSATA RAID cases run a couple hundred bucks, new. 4TB SATA drives run less than that. With 6 raid ports on a mainboard and a couple of dual- or quad-eSATA port PCI-x cards, you can approach petabytes quickly—and just for four digits. The same goes for processing power—a dual-processor Xeon setup (in which each processor can have core counts in the double digits) again just runs $couple thou.

And data is now cheap and easy. Whatever you want—you can have it as data *already*. Movies? Music? Books? Big social data sets? They're coming out our ears. The investment of time and equipment required, all in all, to put yourself in a position to rip and store a library of "every movie you've ever rented," and then actually do so, is much larger than the cost of simply licensing them via streaming. The same goes for music, ebooks, and so on.

There's just no need. Even my desktop is now starting to feel obsolete—for the work computing I do, there's a good chance I'll just go to Amazon cloud services in the next year or two. At that point, an iPad, a wireless keyboard, and a couple apps will probably be all the computing power I need under my own roof. If I have a desktop, it'll just be to connect multiple monitors for screen real estate.

Re:Yup.

[FlyHelicopters]

:) I used to be a computer hoarder... I actually still own an Apple IIgs and even an ImageWriter II color 24-pin dot matrix printer.

Why? Well, the computer makes sense, I want to show my kids what computers were like when Daddy was growing up, the printer? Meh, a huge paperweight I guess, but you can still buy ribbons for it.

I used to have a 386DX-25 setup, a 486-DX/2-66, and a Pentium 166 MMX, just "in case" I wanted to play around with older stuff.

I have since thrown those away, I turned them on about once every other year, for about 2 hours. :)

I do still have a Pentium 4 under my desk with Windows 98 on it. It works, the RAM and hard drives have been upgraded in it, but really, what am I keeping that for?

Under another desk I have a Core 2 Quad Q6600 machine with Windows XP on it, but frankly, it hasn't been turned on in 3 or 4 months. I have it "just in case" I want to run something on XP.

You have no idea how hard it was to throw out the three older PCs, but you know what? I don't miss them. You can't keep everything (or you shouldn't) and they really weren't being used.

----------------

Speaking of digital data, this summer I discovered Amazon Prime Music, a recently added feature. I have a ton of ripped music on my computer and copied to my phone and iPad... you know what I've discovered? Almost everything I listen to is now free on Amazon.

Between purchased shows and movies and all the Prime Videos, I have more entertainment than I can really ever consume. :)

I'll have a desktop for a long time, if only because I need a full size keyboard, mouse, and large monitors (I do software development so I have three 30" monitors at my desk, I can't do this from a laptop).

--------------

The funny thing is all the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits did nothing to get me to stop using Torrents (which I used to do 24/7).

You know what did? Reasonable cost options and ease of use streaming. Giving me legal options killed the illegal options cold. It took them long enough...

About 2 years ago when I put the Roku boxes in place, I deleted over 40TB of movies, most of which had never been watched. Crazy waste of time and money, oh well... :)

The freaky part? My electric bill went down about $50 a month once I got rid of the server and DVD/BR ripping computers which ran 24/7. I put a kill-a-watt device on them and found they used about that much power each month, for 6 years...

Sheesh...

A credit card

[Anonymous Coward]

...and an Amazon Web Services account. What?

My isn't typical but here it goes

[OldHoster]

I have two 48U racks with a 20KVA ups and then we have a 75KW diesel generator that will run the whole house the computer room has a dedicated CRAC unit and will back up with some of the home units and I have the APC air conditioned racks for secondary. Some equipment. Personal: Two NAS's that have 45 drives each one has 1TB drives in it now the other has 1/2 2TB drives and 1/2 4TB drives. I am upgrading drive size on both to 45 4TB drives as soon as I can get them. These are setup with ZFS and they store all of my video's back up every thing every 15 minutes(ZFS Snapshot's) I run PLEX as my video server and love it! I have all my old TIVO's and documents and eMail to the 94 time frame. I also do a bunch of Photography and have every picture since the late 90's on there. I have a Zimbra eMail server and a couple of utility servers etc. I have Mac Mini's on all TV's and iMacs for the kids with the others being laptops. I have a 6506 with a SUP720 10gbit and 1gbit throughout. I have 8 Meraki 3 radio AP's throughout the house we have them through out all of our offices and my boat as well, it is nice I can be securely connected to my work wifi at any location or my house network I choose. Enterprise: We have an office in a hurricane prone area and a tornado prone area so I will say this the data storage on that side it is much bigger. And we have enough Citrix servers to run 200 people from home along with VOIP phone server. Links: GigE Metro primary back to our office would love to have dark fiber but those guys don't like building into residential neighborhoods. Secondary is a 100MB business internet connection that I have with a VPN fail over back to our office. Tertiary is a long range wireless system on multiple towers I get 40MBIT/Sec now but we are upgrading radios and will be in the hundreds in the next month, the link goes back to our colocation facility. I have a PTP link to my boat so I can watch video in a lot of the bay from my house. Your thinking why, I am a cofounder of a consulting firm and colocation facility that has over 200 employee's and we can't be down and I was the one building a new house.

Re:My isn't typical but here it goes

[MooseMiester]

Man after my own heart as Marina Wi-Fi absolutely sucks,

But what does it do?

[WaffleMonster]

What does this "datacenter" in TFA actually do? From youtube videos they pointed to some servers with labels like "push email" ... the whole rack of SGI's? Spammers?!??

Another section of Apache/MySQL "cluster" and DNS servers with only a 60mbit link...

They have a list of websites hosted on the "datacenter" but this appears to be mostly run of the mill basic business fronts/web presence.

Notice the light patterns on the switch ports all of the activity at time of filming appears to be dominated by broadcast.

What does it all do?

MELE A2000

[Anonymous Coward]

Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
BogoMIPS : 1001.88
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x3
CPU part : 0xc08
CPU revision : 2

Re:Down to one for me...

[brokenin2]

I've always wanted to have a fairly minimal setup.. We don't have a lot of space, and I don't want to waste a lot of energy, so I've always tried to have 1 always on server as my target. I've had two and three at times, but mostly just during upgrades, or while I was waiting to find the time to upgrade..
I have 1 quad core i7 with 32 gigs of ram, and 8 1.5 terrabyte hard drives running in RAID 6. The hardware has two network cards, which allows me to do just about everything I want with virtual machines running under KVM. Things are getting a little tight these days, so I'm looking to upgrade to 3 terrabyte drives for 18 terrabytes usable space, and I'd also like to move up to 64 gigs of ram, but I'm going to wait as long as I can so maybe the prices will come down a bit.
The server runs cool and is pretty quiet as I've chosen to go with a 4U case with the largest fans I could find. I've got a 24 port gigabit switch and an access point to round out my hardware.. Everything else is virtualized.

Hardware Summary:
4U server - 32 gigs ram, i7 9 terabytes usable RAID 6, and dual nics
1U 24port gigabit smart switch
2U rack mount UPS
generic 802.11 b/g/n access point

Virtualized:
Firewall/vpn server
File server
Plex server
4x part time windows XP for experiments and various utilities
3x part time windows 7
Vuze server

Benefits:
quiet
reliable
small footprint
relatively low power (about 150-175 watts most of the time, and during the winter it just reduces the amount the electric furnace runs)
low maintenance

Downside:
All your eggs in one basket - I have backups, but I'll be down in the event of hardware failure.
VM host is a little weaker than is optimal when I'm running a lot of guests

A Mac and a couple of powerful laptops thanks

[BillBrains]

What are people doing with all this HW in the homes? Where are they putting it? In the garage? Me, well I have my good ol Mac and a couple of laptops running Windows, Linux, VMware. Traditional client to server technology NoMachine NX so when I am not at home I can still get access to what I need such as checking that my kids have done their homework, and aren't playing games on the computer.

The usual stuff....

[Anonymous Coward]

Proper wifi coverage for the wife and kids. I live in a rural area so there's no fiber. That's why it seemed like a good idea to keep a rack in the basement with half a dozen servers. The main one is a PowerEdge R710 based VMware server with 144 Gbytes of memory, a terabyte of SAS RAID storage and 12 gigabit ports. Some 20 ethernet points around the house and DSL with automatic failover to 4G. All servers and clients are backed up nightly to a TSM server with a copy pool on an external USB drive in case I need to grab everything and run.

On the plus side, the rack pretty much takes care of any heating needs during the winter.

For me it's

[malkavian]

A Utilite Pro which gives me all the grunt I need for an always on server, coupled to an external old DroboPro with 10TB of storage.

Which Datacenter ?

[Foske]

I have a wife. Mutually exclusive with datacenters. Replace the w with an l at will.

Re:Which Datacenter ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a wife. Mutually exclusive lith datacenters. Replace the l with an l at lill.

Syntax error at line 1.

Keeping it cheap and low-energy

[hankwang]

I was using an old netbook (Atom N270) as a home media server, keeping it running Ubuntu Desktop 9.something. But it was too much of a pain to maintain: keeping it on mains power for a year seems to break the battery-charge-level monitoring, which makes the internal battery useless as a UPS. Too many processes insisted on writing to files every 5 minutes, which was spinning up the hard disk all the time. Also, it got uncomfortably hot with the lid closed all the time.

So I got a second-hand thin client (Via 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB internal flash drive, 1 GB RAM, gigabit ethernet) for 75 euros, installed Ubuntu Server 12.04 and a USB hard disk that has a auto spin-down feature. The 1 GiB "SSD" turned out to be too small for OS and log files, so I augmented it with a 4 GB USB thumb drive, while cursing that it is very hard to find one that performs well on lots of small writes (With 4 kB random block write tests, the throughput of most sticks is less than 0.01 MB/s). This thing takes about 13 W of power while idle (26 euros/year at our rates) and last time I looked, there are no alternatives on the market that have comparable horsepower for much less watts. The server hosts media files (MiniDLNA) and backups (snapshots) of the various computers/tablets/phones. Once or twice a year, I sync the disk with an external USB drive. If my house goes up in flames, all will be gone.

Since my media storage is mostly audio, a 1 TB drive is plenty. When I read here from people that have 40 TB of storage in NAS arrays, I wonder what they are hoarding. At 5 GB per hour of video, that's 8000 hours!

Ubuntu 12.04 server sucks for a headless server. I think it was waiting for a keypress after an unclean boot. (There was a comment on a forum of a guy who had to drive 100 miles to a datacenter to attach a keyboard and press Enter). That one was solved, but now it just hangs during filesystem checking at boot time - some bad boot-order dependency.

Network: ethernet in living room (A/V center) and work room (desktop/printer); wifi elsewhere. Visitors get the wifi password. Non-media file transfers and backups are always over ssh. (It t1urns out that the gigabit ethernet was overkill; the VIA CPU can barely saturate a 100 Mbps ethernet line, with the faster SSH cipher (arcfour).

Too much

[mseeger]

Pure datacenter are: 2 firewalls, 1 Sun X2100, 1 QNAP NAS, 1 PC, 1 Raspberry, 1 VoIP-Gateway, 1 Homematic automation server, WLAN Controller
In the network: 5 mobile devices, 2 PC, 1 Notebook, BluRay-Player, 4 Audio Devices (Sonos), 2 Access Points, 2 USB-via-IP extender, Printer, Scanner, multiple IP-based sensors

Home data centers, really?

[ruir]

I can play test stuff in the pre-production servers at work, and I also have an AWS account...

My rack

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

42u rack on coasters, with 4 running boxes. Cisco r180 router, 2016swr managed switch, cisco AP for wifi.
File server, 4u, 10TB+ (4.5TB raid 10), 10GB ram, i5 2.8ghz, 4x intel 1000pt nics (bonded in 2012).
HyperV: hp6005 w/ Athlon X4 3ghz, 10GB ram (runs multiple hyper-v VMs), w a 128GB SSD for the VM's
Domain controler: HP 6005 X2 2ghz
Sharepoint: HP 6005 X2 2gz

All that's in a rack, along with customize cross-over patch panels, all cat6. Outside the "datacenter" are 3 other boxes, 2 laptops, 1 samsung q1 (with an SSD and 2gB ram), and an hp mini.

I love the hp 6005's, SFF's for a test / home lab. low power consumption, but still decently upgradeable and 3 can fit on a half shelf. I had to cut a hole in the ceiling and rig up many fans blowing up into a homemade poster board "hood", and a fan / tube over the AC vent blowing down to make it "cycle". Dropped the temps in there 10+ degrees. The floor is carpet, so there are two levels of 1/2 plywood with commercial bathroom 4mm 2x2ft lanolium to roll the rack around on.

I got lucky recently, my building has been undergoing renovations and they've been throwing out old equipment and a few rack pieces here and there. Found 3x slide rails, some half-shelves, etc.

Why I wired Ethernet in most rooms (and no WiFi)

[advid.net]

First why I decided to not use WiFi at home:

1- Security concerns: I didn't want to invest so much time to learn how to secure my WiFi. It was 10 years ago, home equipment wasn't safe, and I had to learn from scratch.
2- Safety concerns: with baby and/or young children I felt I would rather not add RF generator inside my home. I know we are immersed in RF from everywhere, making some a few meters away is another level. I didn't want to add that. Just in case.
3- Network speed: 10 years ago, Ethernet was much faster than WiFi
4- Reinforced concrete could make dead spot in some rooms, what's the point of WiFi if I can't enjoy it everywhere or have issues?

Why I used Ethernet:

1- Rather easy wiring for my home configuration.
2- Fast and reliable
3- Security (neighborhood, not talking of Internet)

Why almost all rooms wired:

- Garage: my first noisy file server
- Two bedrooms out of three: Laptops / iMac
- Living room: gateway, main PC, printer, new file server, console, laptop, media player, guest laptop, ...
- Kitchen: laptop (after dinner)

Jailbroken iPhone 4s git SCM

[Coward Anonymous]

I currently have a retired iPhone 4s serving primarily as a git server. Also useful as an SSH tunnel into the home network; to view IP cameras remotely without exposing them to the outside world, for example.

The 4s replaced a 3Gs that replaced a 3G that replaced a long serving, flash only, nslu2 running CVS and later SVN.

Of the bunch, the 4s is the first device that is indistinguishable over the network, performance wise, from PC workstations I've worked with. I imagine the 5, 5s and 6/6+ must be fantastic.

It is available, compact, mobile, has a built in screen and keyboard, and 24 hour UPS battery backup with plenty of oomph and storage for a git server and much more. What's not to love?

Raspberry Pi and 4 Tb disk

[Anonymous Coward]

Raspberry Pi and 4 Tb disk, and a wlan router next to it.

Evolution of my setup

[advid.net]

First:
- 8 ports 10/100 switch.
- Big noisy custom DIY file server, wall mounted, 6 hard drives, 1.3To , some with redundancy.

Now
- 16 ports 10/100/1000 switch
- Compact silent low power NAS, 2 drives, 2 To, one logical drive is with redundancy, the other is for big files with no redundancy.

Re:Evolution of my setup

[Anonymous Coward]

I especially enjoyed your use of 'To' as some sort of proxy for 'TB'. Care to share with us why you are such a special snowflake that your drives must be measured in 'To' rather than 'TB'?

Article fails to understand watts

[Hypotensive]

This article would be a whole lot more impressive if the author actually knew what a watt was. The article repeatedly uses kW/hour even though this is not a measure. You either have a kilowatt (measure of power, or energy over time), or a kilowatt hour (amount of energy that running one kilowatt for an hour, or kilowatt MULTIPLIED BY hour, consumed).

Saying "average consumption is 1-2 kW/hour" is just nonsensical. If you mean that consumption is 1-2 kilowatt-hours, then over what time? Or more likely you just mean that average consumption is 1-2 kilowatts.

What's the point?

[Qbertino]

What's the point? Eat's power, wastes my time, is noisy, etc.

I've got two 1TB USB HDDs for archive and longterm storage (USB powered, to avoid the hassle with powerbricks) and I regularly archive to one of those and then arsync to the other twice a year or so, so they're basically manually mirrored. I've got three smaller Timemachine/Incremental Backup drives (again USB, USB powered) for sequential backup and disaster recovery, should one of my laptops (MB Air & Lenovo Linux Thinkpad) or my Mac Mini crash its HDD/SDD.

I do not have a landline internet connection, but that's a different story. I find I use my time more usefully. I've got plenty of broadband at work and at Starbucks or Tenten. For private Inet sessions I go there for a few hours saturdays or sundays. When I'm of the grid I hang out with my daughter and her mom, go dancing, meet with friends or read a nice book. So no need for fiddling with oversized hardware on that side either.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

"For private Inet sessions I go there for a few hours saturdays or sundays."

Except, this is not true. Your Internet traffic is not "private", not in the least. You are sharing your Internet session with every customer in the store, the employees, the store itself, and oh yes, lest I forget, the guy sitting out in the parking lot with a Pringles can pointed at the store.

Anything online requiring privacy, I prefer to do from the privacy of my own home using security that *I* control, not some big corporation with dubious intentions. It is far more difficult to breach the security of my house (physical access) than running a wireless sniffer in a coffee shop. And if someone has breached my house, there are far more important issues to deal with than private Internet browsing.

Home NAS, 3 years running.

[bsdpanix]

Home built rack
Supermicro CSE-SC825TQ 2U case with 8 horizontal hot swap cages, triple NIC (one IPMI dedicated), dual 700w PSU
Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O motherboard, with Intel Xeon E3-1230 Sandy Bridge, E31230 @ 3.20GHz 16GB Kingston DDR3 ECC RAM
Single 30GB SSD for OS, Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS
LSI 9260-8i RAID controller, 8 Seagate Barracuda XT (ST32000641AS)
RAID-6, 10TB single xfs filesystem
Samba shared to house, wired with CAT6 to most rooms
pfSense firewall, Arch desktop, laptop, etc

An endless downgrade cycle

[thegarbz]

I'm working on an endless downgrade cycle tending towards appliances rather than computers. I used to have big hardware. Pentium Pros, Xeons, SCSI drives, etc, but as time wears on I keep seeing the powerbill and asking myself what am I really getting for my money.

My most recent upgrade saw me go from a quad core Xeon to an Intel Atom, and replace a rack of 12 HDDs with 2, though recently I added another 2TB HDD to that. The little Intel Atom motherboards runs headless with no GUI and makes a great file server / web server / email server / tinkerbox. However I'm getting tired of tinkering. I'm begining to think I'll just buy a Synology NAS or something similar and just move on with my life.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I have about 30Tb at home, gigabit ethernet from the server out to lounge and bedroom. Need it for streaming bluray isos and good to be able to watch them wherever. Also the pro ip cam on the front door (axis m3005) is POE ethernet only. All in all very fast and rock solid. Also have 802.11n dual band on asus AP which im using right now from phone, but for high bandwidth/large files 1000mbit copper.

Honest question: why?

[HnT]

I used to love running my own Linux gateway box in the 90s and was proud as can be of it's uptime and for a while I was leading the eggdrop-bot uptime stats, so I completely understand the fascination of fiddling around on servers as a hobby. Still, I got to ask: why would anyone want to spend all that money to install a data center in their garage and what are you people using it for? There is only so much you can really do and your home data-center needs will typically be ridiculously small and won't go far above needing some storage and backup.

I cannot imagine a single use that would warrant shelling out that much money for the gear and electricity. If you want to teach yourself the skills, fine, I can see that point but you do not need two or three full racks and blade servers for that. If I really needed so many servers for test runs of an application, well you could just rent a couple of nodes on S3 or some other virtualization service and only switch them on when you really need them. It would cost much less, be more reliable and you could actually focus on getting your work done - instead of spending all that time maintaining all this junk in your basement.

So, enthusiasts, please tell me: why and what do you use it for?

Finally, a more "traditional" Slashdot topic

[guacamole]

I got hooked ever since I found about a Beowulf cluster of Playstations running Linux.

Another downsizer...

[UncleRage]

Where I once had a rotation of 1 or 2u racks, I now have a couple of i7 Mac Minis (with several external dual drive LaCie's in mirrored mode) running VMWare.

As I traded my consulting gig for straight employment a few years ago, I'm housing far less data, too... Nas4Free for files/media, VPN for when I'm at work (which is funny, because as soon as I'm home I VPN into work...), MySQL, GLPi and Calibre.

Other than that, I've got my workstation (probably my last custom build....) in my home office, a couple of Pi's running XBMC and my ever present MacBook Air.

Just the computer and network infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

My PC also acts as a NAS and server. Not much need to have multiple boxes for most tasks, VMs are fine, and most of the time I don't even need VMs. I could probably reduce the power use by getting a dedicated NAS, and use my Raspberry pi, but I frequently need the power of the PC for interactive work, so I may as well use that for servers too. And now winter is coming, so power is less of an issue.

Arch Linux server in the basement

[Anonymous Coward]

The server consists of:
Asus B85M-G iB85
Crucial 2x2GB, DDR3, PC10666, CL9
Intel Celeron G1820 2.70GHz 2MB Box
In a Fractal Design Define R3 (Black) | FD-CA-DEF-R3-BL
2x Samsung EcoGreen F4EG. 2TB | HD204UI (and a 500 MB root disc)
Be Quiet! Pure Power L7 300W | BN103

It performs various tasks, BTSync always-on, Samba, Drupal site, Sites for friends, Mail server for me and Wife, Proxy for secure browsing, SSH, VNC for personal stuff from work (over SSH.) The two discs are synced (cumulative) each night.

Re:Arch Linux server in the basement

[Anonymous Coward]

Also it downlaods from usenet using Sabnzbd to folder available to my Openelec running Raspberry Pi.

Home and offsite data center

[Walter White]

No racks. I have a Thinkpad T500 ('08 vintage) that I've bumped up to 8GB RAM and 240GB SSD so the T9400 Core 2 Duo provides decent performance. I've recently added a similar vintage aluminum MacBook that's been bumped to 4GB RAM and I've installed an SSD in that as well. Despite the 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo it does a decent job for surfing and perhaps some day some light IOS development. For heavy lifting I have a dual monitor workstation powered by an i7-4770K with a 260GB SSD (and an older 30GB SSD) for boot, system and home and a couple of RAIDED 7 year old 200GB Barracudas for scratch storage. This all gets backed up to a box with a couple 2TB drives that are mirrored. It was running on an Atom D525 but that motherboard stopped working a few weeks ago and has been replaced with one sporting a J1900 Celeron. With a newer PSU it idles along at 24 watts. That system also serves as NAS on the home LAN. I have a similar system (still running on a Atom) that is located at my son's place for offsite backup. In the middle of the night I send it a Wake On Lan packet (over the Internet), kick off the backup and when that's finished, it goes back to sleep. SWMBO has a couple year old Thinkpad that she uses. I have some older equipment that I don't count since it rarely gets used. I also don't count my smart phones or HP Touchpad since they're not real computers. ;) At the moment I also have a Cisco router that VPNs into work and an i7-4770 based Dell box (tiny little thing!) that I develop on. Everything except wife's laptop, MacBook and the work computer run Debian or Mint Linux.

Right now? Here's what I've got...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell 24U "half rack" with it's sides & doors intact, containing:
* Cisco SG300 switch (wish to replace with 48 port Force 10)
* Dell PowerEdge 1950
* HP DL160 G6, 12x cores, 72GB RAM... the "big" hypervisor box

It's still pretty empty. In November I'll be filling out 12U of space with a ceph cluster, which will allow me to retire the HP N40L microserver that's not inside of the rack. I'd like to get one more of those DL160's as a second hypervisor, so I can live migrate virtual machines from one to the other (once their virtual disks are backed by ceph rbd).

MythTV, FreeNAS

[crow]

I have MythTV running with a 3TB drive, but it's down to the last 100GB. It also holds all our photos and Time Machine backup for one iMac. I'm now planning a FreeNAS box with 8TB usable and drive slots for three more drives when that fills up (probably 6TB or larger drives by then). I plan on ripping all our DVDs and putting them in storage.

I did a comparison of the cost between the server and a nice entertainment center that was mostly for storing DVDs, and the server won by a landslide.

How do you get 32 SATA ports on a pi?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 16x3TB and 16x4TB. How do I get that on a PI? Calling a single 500GB USB drive a "datacenter" is just silly.

When a surplus server isn't the correct answer...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a Dell PowerEdge 2950 in a 15u rack in the garage with 4 terabytes of storage. It needs to be replaced, but I do some work with ESX, so whatever I replace it with needs to have grunt.

The reason is 'needs' to be replaced: power consumption and noise (hence why it's in the garage). Standing next to it with the dual Xeons loaded up (along with 32GB of ram) and the fans go full-on data center bonkers.

Work Rack and Home Rack

[Harlequin80]

I work from home and have always kept my work machines and my home machines seperate.

Work
2 x dual quad xenon intel 2ru servers with 64gb ram - running proxmox and all systems virtualised
1 x 2ru quad xenon intel with 128gb ram running Nexenta acting as nfs target for the server and the two work stations.

Home Rack
21tb Freenas Media box - consumer grade X4 amb with 16gb ram and lots of hdd.
XBMC Core server - shuttle xs35 atom box - also runs mysql (for xbmc), deluge, usenet grabber, dans guardian, squid, etc etc
Gaming rig - 8 core amd with dual nvidia cards - set to wake on lan and boot steam - I then stream to my laptop

Re:Work Rack and Home Rack

[Anonymous Coward]

With all that gear you should probably already know that intel does not make xenon processors. Xeon...*sigh*.

Tired of throwing out old technology

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of upgrading to newer technology and throwing out obsolete stuff. I used to hang onto it, not wanting to admit it was time to throw out thousands of dollars of hardware that was essentially useless. My philosophy now is to use as few machines as possible, and to put as few parts in them as possible. Fortunately, with Core i5 and Core i7 boxes, they don't get obsolete nearly as fast as they used to.

ZFS for go home

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a file server until you're running ZFS.

Penis-waving much?

[buckfeta2014]

I have a router, a switch, a wireless access point, a desktop-class server, and two desktops. I highly doubt anyone needs several full racks of enterprise-class servers.

A VAX

[Snotnose]

CSB

Back in the 80s my company had 2 VAX 11/750s. They got obsoleted and the company wanted to get rid of them. So one of our system admins, a kid going to UCSD, took one home, along with a hard drive (separate unit). He installed it in the laundry room of the condo he was renting and used it for a year before moving out. When he moved he just left the VAX behind.

Atom mainboard + PCI RAID card + 4 HDDs

[gshegosh]

My home data center is a single frankenPC that I made from an old chassis, a mainboard that has integrated Intel Atom CPU, PCI RAID card and 4 HDDs. It's running Ubuntu Server. It works well enough, Linux manages the RAID and emails me when drives are failing, it has a transmission-deamon which is a torrent client with web interface, it also runs Sickbeard that downloads tv episodes automatically for me. The box also does and stores backups of my other computers AND web servers. I have gigabit ethernet at my home and the box can saturate it (although I use WD Red drives which are not that fast). Also, the whole setup grabs just 35W of power (it takes about 24W when I spin HDDs down, but I don't think they like it, so I don't do it).

A modest configuration

[NecroBones]

I used to salvage all sorts of gear from my job, saving rackmount gear that would otherwise have been junked.

However, as my rack (a small 22U unit) tended to get rather full, and it was generating a lot of heat and noise, I eventually looked to consolidate. Now, I keep one physical server that runs a couple of VMs, cisco router, switch, UPS, and the remaining space contains a shelf and a sliding drawer to keep spare parts, hard disks, etc. Now it's much more quiet, and doesn't heat my house all through the summer. :)

Cheap, old, high density dell stuff.

[bytestorm]

Racked at the house...
Dell C6100, 4x { 2x L5639, 32GB ram }
Dell C1100, 2x L5639, 48GB ram
Dell Powerconnect 5324 with a permanent fan error because I unplugged it, the noisy bastard.
Ubiquiti ERL-3

Maybe half full of SATAs, most of which are spun down. Further sliced into VMs because I like to play around with KVM/ESXi. Mostly used for ADC, media serving, local backup, test build environments, autodeployment script tests, etc. It'll draw 6-8A @110V easy with everything spinning max load, but it usually idles around 1.2-2A as I only wake 3 of the C6100 sleds on-demand. Config exactly mirrors my colo, which pays for both, but is not my job.

Workstation's notable components are the G530, GTX460, a cheap-as-it-comes asus MB, and 3x displays.
Half a dozen or so ARM SBCs (rpi, udoo, beaglexM, etc) doing menial things like RTP audio endpoints, ethernet-attached GPIO, openelec.

Very much so

[Sycraft-fu]

I always thought it was an awesome idea to have a bigass set of computers at home... Ya well now I get paid to manage a bigass set of computers professionally and I'd rather just leave them there, thanks. Also there's no compelling reason to want my own servers for the sort of things I do, VMs work so well. I'll just lease one from somewhere, or spin one up at work.

At home, all my gear is related to, well, home use. More than a non-geek would have for sure but no data center.

media and backups

[neghvar1]

Server 2012 R2, Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz, 4 GB DDR2, 3TB RAID 5 array all in a ridiculously heavy SuperMicro tower. I use mine for the media content my Roku accesses and backing up our three PCs. It also functions as a Domain, DNS, DHCP, File, and Print server for the 4 PCs, 2 laptops and 3 smartphones and 3 tablets.

Finally a chance to share my nerdiness!

[HerculesMO]

So in my basement I have a 36U HP server rack that I got off of Craigslist for around $200. It is 350 lbs and getting it home was a huge challenge; the person who buys my home will inherit this rack; I think next time I do this I'll get a freestanding rack that's a lot cheaper and easier to set up.

Anyway that aside... I have a TP-LINK VPN router that intakes my cable modem connection (100/50 -- Optimum is great!). That plugs into a Dell 48 Port switch on a single VLAN (no need for multiples). I have an i5 server with SSD and 2x2TB drives in mirror that acts as my HTPC and Media Center (the Microsoft one). Attached to that is a Ceton card that records all my TV, and distributes that to two XBoxes in my family room and bedroom (so I can watch live TV and DVR). That setup is amazing. Additionally I have Media Browser (http://www.mediabrowser.tv) running to 3 Roku boxes in the family room, bedroom, and living room.

Every bedroom in my house gets two ethernet jacks. The kitchen and family room also have two. I also run Unifi POE Access Points on each floor of my house (they are great) to do my wireless; I don't have a wireless router.

That's about it... it's a great setup that saves me a lot of money on my cable bill (no boxes), provides a lot of flexibility for content I watch and stream, and it's all backed up to a cloud backup, Crashplan.

The responses are in a few main categories

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems there are four main categories of responses:

1) Those who have learned that less is more, who had more equipment than they really needed and have been paring back to simpler, fewer boxes.
2) Those who are still learning that lesson.
3) Those that "do this at work" and have what essentially is a "home lab" to play with that same software or hardware.
4) Those that collect or save old equipment.

I was a 3 for a while, but am definitely a 1 now. Used to keep several servers, but that was by "necessity" because compute cycles and space was expensive. I currently have a Dell GX1 with a pair of mirrored 72 GB drives for data, a 400 GB that gets a ZFS snapshot nightly as a partial backup. I also have an older whitebox that does WOL weekly to get a weekly snapshot of that same data. Also, a 16 port 100 Mb switch and the DSL modem/wireless router. About once every month or two I update a USB drive with a new backup and take it offsite.

Total load, about 150-200 watts most of the time, 250-300 once a week for an hour or so. Soon, I'll be changing to something probably involving an embedded Celeron and swap out the main drive with an SSD and let the bigger backup spinning platter disks spin down most of the time. That should cut power to ~30 watts or less (excluding DSL, which I can't easily get around, but it's small and quiet so no worries there). Sure, payback will take 5-7 years, but I'm looking forward to total silence. :)

Apple, it Just Works for me.

[Xel]

I used to have a rack, servers, all that; it was overkill but learning it was my hobby. But then I learned it, and it became a PITA to babysit all of it. These days I have kids, and my main need is streaming Pixar movies to the living room, music to the kitchen, TV shows to the bedrooms, Rocky to my iPad when I'm on the treadmill... and I wanted something that just works. And for me, that's Apple and iTunes for now.

So its a 27" iMac running iTunes, with a 3TB internal drive to store everything, A cheap WD drive as a backup, another SSD I back up to and take to work with me, and Im looking into a cloud backup. After having a series of expensive drives and RAIDs and Drobos that seemed to go belly up just as often as the cheap drives, I realized that quantity>quality when it comes to backups.

An Airport Extreme with 802.11ac gives me the bandwidth, and two Airport Expresses strategically placed in the bedroom and kitchen can stream music and boost my signal. Security isn't a bit concern for me right now; my work and private data stays on my encrypted laptop, if anyone broke into my iMac they'd only be able to steal a copy of WoW and a bunch of movies and AACs I totally didn't steal in the first place.

My setup.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing special, but it works for me. One desktop server in the finished basement, which is my office area. Single drive for root, and a pair of 3TB WD Reds for /media/storage in mdadm RAID 1. It's a low wattage/as green as I could build it at the time i3 with 4GB of RAM. The server does a number of things... off the top of my head - ownCloud, web, file, print, video streaming (HTPC runs XBMC, which mounts /media/storage/videos over smb for streaming TV/movies, etc), music streaming through Subsonic, along with video surveillance. I run Motion for quick JPG snapshots to get a glimpse of what happened, and cross reference those JPG snapshots (if need be) against my cameras saving 24/7/365 "full time record" over smb to my server, in a separate 500GB HDD at /media/surveillance. Full time recording is significantly lighter on CPU load, and likewise it ensures I won't ever skip a beat (which has happened before).

While I'm at it, I also use the ownCloud Android app for my phone and my wife's phone. It auto uploads video/pictures over wifi to the home server, which then syncs down via the sync client to our laptops/desktops. I don't really care for keeping pictures in the sync folder and much rather have them on a samba share on the server, so I archive them accordingly into /media/storage/pictures on the main server, which of course get sync'd to the backup server nightly as I'll go into in a minute. Then of course XBMC on the HTPC mounts "Pictures" as server:/media/storage/pictures, which makes for a really nice way to show pictures to family on the big screen. This self-hosted cloud process is pretty much awesome, as it enables us to have a far more limitless upload limit given we have about 900 GB free to access with ownCloud picture uploads, as opposed to the 5 GB Dropbox limit. Likewise, the speed is undeniable. After a week's vacation when we hit the wifi again, we sync up in no time at all. Plus, it's SO nice knowing it's actually backed up. Dropbox says right in their TOS, even for paid users, your data integrity is not guaranteed. If even as a paying customer I can't be assured my data is safe, then you can cross that nonsense option off the list.

Moving along, at 3 AM every night, my server sends a WOL (wake on LAN) packet to a 2nd server on my LAN to turn that backup server on, pauses for 5 minutes in case the backup server does a disk check, then it rsync's all important data over. Six days a week it does a regular rsync. Sunday nights (well technically Monday morning at 3 AM) it'll pass rsync --delete, to reset all data on the backup server as a mirror of what's on the main server. Once the sync is done, it pauses for 1 minute (not sure why I added this, but I figured maybe it'd give the disks a chance to simmer down), and then shuts the backup server off. Reason I did this is because I want to be as green as possible in terms of electricity usage. The backup server runs for an average of 10 minutes a day. If a 5 line bash script is all I need to 1) turn the server on, 2) pause 5m, 3) rsync data, 4) append date/time stamp to txt log for reference, 5) shut it down, to thereby run the server for 10 minutes a day instead of 24 hours a day, AND get a backup out of it, I'm game.

All systems in the house rsync their home directories to the main server whenever they start up. It's a basic bash script that I tagged as a startup application. Once it boots, it pauses for a minute to give wifi more than enough time to connect, then rsync's the data to /media/storage/backups/user, then as mentioned it gets rsync'd again to the backup server at 3 AM.

Each system that successfully rsync's appends the date/time to their corresponding txt file, located in /media/storage/backups/backup_logs. That way I can visually see if an automated backup didn't kick off for whatever reason, or I can tell that my wife didn't restart her computer in 3 weeks, restart it, and the rsync script takes over. I've tri

less and less PC, mostly AV these days

[anjrober]

i used to have a bunch of servers, gear, KVMs, etc. over the years, i have paired it back more and more.

today i have a synology NAS (killed the loud old dell home server), 7 sonos ZP120s (yes i know they are wireless but these are powering in wall/ceiling/outdoor speakers), UPS, cable box, dvd, tivo (all AV gear is wired to tv flat mounted upstairs), IR extender solution, Yamaha amp, apple mini (used for CLI only), router, switch, wifi AP, etc.

distributed setup plus 4TB mirrored filestore

[netsavior]

I have all our media files on 2 fileservers (old desktops with big hard drives), then I have a distributed webserver with metadata stored on a cassandra cluster. All 6 desktops/laptops are members, so any of them can serve up a request for file lists/images/"channel" listings. This replaced a perfectly working setup with static xml files for metadata, but I wanted to learn cassandra.

I am trying to "embrace" the cloud so my eventual setup will be to have no dedicated servers at all, but to have the ragtag collection of active desktops and laptops in my house and have server type stuff I do now be more or less distributed (7 people live and use computers in my house)

Re:old school youare all AMATEURS

[Anonymous Coward]

Pencil
Paper
Envelope
Horse
PFFT!!!

Minimal and low power

[Torp]

I still run my own handmade gateway box, but it's Atom based and uses next to no power.
I'm not giving up on it because it's sometimes handy when you work from home.
Other than that, backups on usb connected drives and 1.3 computers per person in the household is enough :)

Re:Minimal and low power

[TeknoHog]

You call Atom low power? ARM based boxes don't even need a heatsink. (I've run Gentoo on Buffalo Linkstations since 2009.)

Commodity crapware

[kage.j]

I'm currently running 2 old desktops stuffed full of HDDs and a new i3 machine.
1) Pentium 4, 4g ddr POS, 6x2tb storage and a tiny OS disc.
2) Older core i7, 8g ddr2, 6x2tb storage and tiny OS disc.
3) i3 machine, 32g ddr3, 16g ssd for OS, 500g for VMs.

Usable space is about 7tb. Server #2 mirrors with server #1, the machines each run raid 5 with a hot spare... overkill but I've lost data enough times to be completely done with that mumbo jumbo. I'll soon be adding storage to #3 and moving #1 off site and mirroring remotely. I run a mix of debian/fedora/other. Between server #2 and #3 I have 6 VMs.

Frankencenter

[Anonymous Coward]

Running an old Compaq tc4400 convertible laptop as an Ubuntu server running the following (though the hard drive can be thrown into any capable machine):
DHCP/PXE
DNS
TFTP
NFS
Samba
SSH
OpenVPN
LDAP
Full LAMP stack
XBMC library/fanart/boxart host
FreeRADIUS
Prosody XMPP server
Running private apt-mirror for 14.04 trusty and Linux Mint 17 (updates at night when satellite data is unmetered).

*Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ (4x1 TB Redundant)
*Holds XBMC content
*Holds shared home directories
*Holds backups

*Linksys E2000 (stock firmware, but looking into DD-WRT) with DHCP disabled.
Running just NAT, wifi AP, switch
Wireless set to N-only
Authenticates clients via RADIUS

*Unmanaged 8-port gigabit switch

*Cisco Aironet 1200 AP
802.11g radio authenticates over RADIUS
802.11a radio disabled

Ethernet to every room. Each workstation runs diskless over gigabit ethernet with a shared home directory which allows preferences and data to roam no matter which physical workstation or PXE image you boot from. I only have to maintain 3 or 4 images and can run as many workstations as I want from a single image. If I want to upgrade, say, one of my media center PCs, it is literally a drop-in replacement. The only configuration I have to do is update the MAC address in DHCP and pxelinux.cfg with that of the new machine. Each computer is assigned a boot image via its MAC address. If no MAC address is found, it will take you to a boot menu where you can select a boot image.

So far, I have 8 concurrent devices booting and running over this setup, and they all run acceptably. I have 4 GB or more RAM in each, so that helps as Linux seems to use filesystem caching a lot more aggressively when running over NFS, though that is just my observation and may not be fact. Six are running on gigabit ethernet and the other two are running on 100 Mbps. Even the latter two have acceptable performance running an XFCE desktop, Chrome, and even streaming with XBMC.

If you're wondering *why* I chose to PXE boot everything, I had two hard drives go down on me within a week, so I decided to centralize my storage for easier backup and redundancy. Plus, I can provision a duplicate workstation in seconds if needed and maintenance is much easier with fewer images to have to deal with.

It's still a work in progress, as I don't have all the LDAP plumbing set up yet for single sign on, but this whole system basically grew as a learning experience from a minimal Ubuntu server install.

My favorite part is issuing 1 WOL command to the server and watching it fire everything else up automatically.

HP Proliant microserver

[MatthewHays]

The HP microserver is relatively cheap, quiet and looks nice enough to sit in my (minimalist) home. It has one SSD for the OS, and two redundant large high capacity disks. The server is on 24/7 and serves all my media (plex etc) and services to wherever I am in the world. All my devices backup their data to it regularly. A subset of this data (things I wouldn't want to loose in a fire) is then sync'd up to my google drive.

Nice and simple, and just works without fuss. Most of my friends use their datacenter as an excuse to geek out, and enjoy the complexity (and the subsequent instability), but I'm most interested in it as a functional/reliable item that I setup once, and use everyday.

what i run...

[Anonymous Coward]

two hp k5400's i got off ebay
two apple gen 5 routers/wap chained (one downstairs, one up two)
one verizon fios @150mbs (any faster the wireless can't handle)
several 1tb drives

I've gone a little overboard...

[Atticka]

Starting from the firewall, infrastructure hardware:
Old PC with added NIC's running Astaro (now Sophos) UTM
HP Procurve 1800-8G switch (in the server closet)
Dlink 8 port gig switch in the basement (media access)
HP Procurve 802.11G AP in the basement
Qnap TS-419PII NAS (with 4x2TB drives)
Meraki 802.11N AP (Demo unit, upstairs)

Clients
7x Android\iOS devices (phones and tablets)
3x PC\Laptops
4x TV\Media players (Smart TV with Netflix, XBMC, BoxOffice, AV Unit)
2x Audio streaming devices (Squeezebox)
1x Hot Tub (remote controlled over IP)
1x Brultech home energy monitor
1x Lexmark laser printer

The phones and tablets are capable of remote controlling the media centres, audio streaming and the hot tub, good wifi coverage on both side of the house (up and down).

Sheevaplug

[splatter]

I'm like the other posters I started out using recycled pc's, but decided to go more green power-wise a few years ago.

I'm using a 1.2GHz Marvell ARM CPU Sheevaplug with 512 MB of flash memory and 512 MB of DDR2 running Ubuntu. I have an additional 512 MB memory card mounted as /var and 2 x 1 TB external USB drives one as my primary and the other as a backup. 50/50 Mb fiber connection to 1 GigE LAN run to the office bedroom, and entertainment centers for lag free video (ushare) & music (mt-daapd) streaming, everyone else uses WiFi.

Low-cost desktop server

[Anonymous Coward]

I just use a full ATX tower case loaded with low-cost server components:

Case: Raidmax Seiran (features 9x 5.25" drive bays)
Mobo: Asrock Fatal1ty A88X ATX
CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU
RAM: 8GB
Primary HDD: 60GB SSD Kingston V300
1x DVD drive
1x Blu-Ray drive
2x 4x3 iStarUSA SATA Hot Swap modules (holds 4 HDD in 3x 5.25" drive slots, hence 4x3)
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.1 Desktop 64-bit version for the pretty GUI, DEATH TO CLI's!!!!!!

Currently holding 26TB of digital enterainment for which I have all the original VHS, CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray copies. Need to upgrade again soon, hoping that 4TB drives will go down further in price with all the 5 & 6 TB drives coming out lately.

Re:Low-cost desktop server

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgot to mention the one expensive part that makes having so many drives possible:

HighPoint 8-Port PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SAS/SATA 6Gb/s non-RAID Controller Components Rocket 2720SGL

Currently $159 on Amazon.

My home Rig

[Anonymous Coward]

wired and wireless
wireless mainly for the 3ds and nook, etc.
48 port switch, since im wired to every room and 3 printers, i ran out on a 24 port
i have 2 servers, one domain controller and the other a file server
these are old hp proliant's a 360 and a 380, lost of space. and they were free
and while i would like to more to something more energy efficient, and QUIETER (that goodness its in the basement)
to replace them would probably cost about $2000 and not in the budget right now.
not to mention i have LTO3 tape drives attached to the server for backup.

Affordable Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

My "datacenter" is a server that records OTA broadcast via a HDHomerun with listing data from schedules direct ($25/yr). The home theater PC is about 6 years old, but it is more than adequate to play 30GB+ rips stored across three newish 4TB drives along with a high efficiency power supply. I have all the live sports games, the news, etc, and with the option to throw in a cable card should a girlfriend demand cable (XBMC front end, MediaPortal back end). The live TV integrates with the movie library of 500 movies seamlessly, and all the media, including live TV, can be streamed to my phone or tablet when away from home (along with scheduling recordings/torrents).

Using IRServer and LIRC gives me all of the control and features of fancy remotes with the simplicity of a single, regular remote. I have cheap RF controlled outlets/plugins connected to an arduino in order to control the lights with the remote and phone. At one point this was integrated with the google calendar API, allowing me to schedule my coffee maker and lights with my calendar, but it was not used regularly.

Other rooms run XBMC on Raspberry Pis, including the option to watch live TV, recording, and movies. Additional features include a redundant WAN connection via OpenWRT and a VPN server. Finally, SkypeIn ($60/yr) is set up for VOIP but there is no asterisk setup.

All told, only the HDDs and second internet connection are significant costs. The saving from switching off of cable TV service has more than covered the cost of the hardware and second internet connection. Speed and redundancy rule and the "girlfriend acceptance factor" is outstanding due to the simplicity of the interfaces.

hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

cable modem
netgear firwall router with 1G ports and Wifi access point
quad core esxi server running home website on linux/wordpress, solaris 11
old mac pro 8 core, 32gb ram, running 10.6.8, vmware fusion, centos 6.8.
link to first floor.. still can't beat wired speed for our desktops

 

12U Rack

[thechemic]

Hardware

• 12U Rack in the attic enclosed and sealed with Oak panels force cool with a 8inch hydroponic blower from 70deg air in the house.
• 24TB Dell R510
• 24TB Dell C2100
• 4TB Four Cluster Dell C6100
• 4TB Dell R410
• Dell iSCSI Certified 48P gigabit switch
• Dell 1920W UPS
• Dell 1920W UPS Extended Battery Module

Configuration

• 4gigabit iSCSI SAN with redundant links
• 4 node Hyper-V failover cluster with SAN storage
• Stand alone VMware servers
• 4 drops to livingroom
• 4 drops to office
• 3 drops to bedroom 1
• 3 drops to bedroom 2
• 3 drops to bedroom 3
• 3 drops to bedroom 4
• Ubiquiti Wifi AC
• 4 external facing IP cameras
• 4 internal facing IP camera
• and one badass pitbull named "buddy" to help run physical security

Mac Mini

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. From racks and switches and fans and cooling and overclocking to f**k it and simplicity.

I develop on company hardware and cloud now.
--dsm

Just some network stuff.

[geekylinuxkid]

Well, I have three racks of gear. I'll just cover the basic stuff and skip the details.

1x GSR 12016 (Yes, I have this in my home. It's for CCIE SP study. Please see linked picture below.)
8x 2811
2x 2821
4x 1841
1x 6509 w/ SUP720-3B
1x 3825
8x 7206VXR
2x 7204VXR
6x 3560G
4x 3550
1x ME3400
1x SRX210H
1x Netscreen 50
1x ASA5505

2x DL380 G5
1x Narco 4220

Picture of my currently running SP Lab with only two racks shown. http://i.imgur.com/j6vlwtj.jpg

Obviously, I'm a network guy. :)


-Jay

Current setup

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have a bunch of old pcs for playing games, calling bbses and playing around with linux/bsd distros. I even had a sun elc solaris box for learning how to be a unix admin.

However, now I try to keep it simple. I have a 12U rack. Inside it are a couple of shelves with an ADSL modem, VOIP box, a tp link wireless router running open wrt ( so I can have multiple SSIDs (guest and proxy) and VLANs. I also have in it an old pc running ubuntu which I use as a server running ssh, apache2 and squid. I store some legal music on the server which I stream to my work when I want to listen to music there, i also have my bookmarks there. Squid blocks all by default and I whitelist sites i want to go to (which end up on my bookmarks list thanks to a nightly cronjob). Squid also only allows internet access until 9pm so I get plenty of sleep and blocks internet access from 6am-9am weekdays so I'm not wasting time before work. Yes, i used to struggle with watching porn but less so now. When the old pc dies or i can be bothered to i will probably replace it with an intel nuc. Cronjobs to reboot the router and server once a week keep things running well.

Not all in one place

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a single data center as such, but have most of the equipment split between the Rec room where the man cave is and the garage where I used to run my computer repair business out of.

In the Rec room I have a dedicated firewall running pfSense, running to a managed gigabit switch with a 6-bay QNAP NAS and dedicated Netgear Wireless-N AP.

In the garage I have 4 dedicated servers: a homebrew Windows Home Server 2011 for Backup, an old Dell Tower Server for file serving and download duties. another homebrew running Hyper-V for visualization and a small Atom nettop I setup as a web server. I also have 2x Netgear 2-bay NAS leftover from a project that didn't work out that are serving files. A 24 port unmanaged HP Gigabit switch that connects everything in the garage.

This all goes to serve the 9 desktops and 12 laptops hanging around the house.

I am currently looking to try and find a 2 post rack to setup in the garage to consolidate and organize some the equipment out there. I have been tempted in the past to try and get a full 4 post rack, but the thought of the trouble required to get rid of it later has stayed my hand.

Can't resist

[MooseMiester]

A "Producer" desk (made for sound/video editing) each side is a rack, haven't measured the U factor it's probably 10 on each side. On the right side a DELL R210 11th generation and a Kenwood TL-922 Amplifier. On the left side a Hammarlund SP-600 JX-17 formerly used by the CIA to monitor Russian RTTY during the cold war and a 70A 12v DC supply with battery backup. Below that a PDP 11/70 "Coffin Cabinet" nameplate for old times sake. On the desk the usual two 27" monitors, a Collins KWM-2A, a Yeasu FT-990, an Alinco DX-70, and a Kenwood 2meter rig. The ham gear is serviced by two towers one 45' and the other 60'

DELL Studio XPS 7100 AMD Phenom II X6, 16GB RAM, 2 TB RAID 1 internal, 12 TB external. In the basement a DELL something or other tower, Linux, 2 TB internal, 2 TB external, this system backs up the servers in the QTS data center where I lease rack space. The usual assortment of phones and tablets for Q/A: iPhone3, iPhone4, iPhone5, iPad Air, Galaxy 4s, Galaxy 10.1" Note, Nokia 720, Garmin fone. Four laptops. Dell studio with i-5-2450M CPU, 4 GB, 256 GB SSD, Dell something or other that should have been a desktop (giant laptop that my wife uses), 2 older DELL laptops converted to Linux. It's all DELL because my company has a commercial account with them so I get a tiny discount.

To support my company (but available for my personal use as the CEO) 3 DELL R210's, 2 R410's, 2 R610's all RAID1 except one at RAID5, virtualized into 7 linux servers and 4 Windoze boxes, 1 TB outbound bandwidth, I've never actually seen any of them as they were drop shipped from DELL to the datacenter where I lease the space. The oldest one is 3 years old, the rest are modern fire breathers supporting the development staff and website hosting. Soon the Windoze client will leave and we'll be down to one of those for development, can't wait.

Cisco 5200 and 3200 routers with a Motorola cable modem at the house/office a 100 year old Victorian house in the country. Of course I wired shit everywhere, coax, phones, ethernet. At the boat I am the volunteer I.T. department for the marina, wireless PTP internet that's fed to two AP's, one that's for my personal use (on the boat I have a pair of Ubiquity Nanos) plus two Nano's that serve as a PTP link to the access gate. I don't count the four computers there as all I do is support them.

Thinking about a MAC Mini or a Macbook AIR as I have no MAC gear that can do Objective-C and it might be fun to learn. At once time I had a Micro-VAX, but the only use I had for it was to warm up the office in the winter, so I loaned it to a flaky friend of mine who desperately needed it for a project - and promptly got into some high drama life situation and CLAIMS he "lost it" but I suspect he sold it for cash. His initials are E.Z. and if he's reading this hey I still want my VAX back !! And no I don't loan computers to anyone, ever, anymore.

So no I can't touch the guys with 48u racks and dedicated HVAC, but the data center where I lease rack space has biometric entry and Maxwell Smart rooms...LOL I thought seriously about building a data center in the basement but just can't get the fiber out here in the country, and at $50/u/month it's hard to justify.

Re:Why I wired Ethernet in most rooms (and no WiFi

[fyngyrz]

2- Safety concerns: with baby and/or young children I felt I would rather not add RF generator inside my home. I know we are immersed in RF from everywhere, making some a few meters away is another level. I didn't want to add that. Just in case.

Ham radio operators -- of which I am one -- spend their lives immersed in more RF at various frequencies from kHz to GHz than you can possibly compare to unless you work at a broadcast radio or television station. And hams are one of the oldest demographics in the USA. So many 80 and 90 year olds, it's really kind of amusing. RF is not your enemy at wifi router and cellphone levels. Not even close.

I've been pretty much bathed in RF for the last forty years. I'm very healthy other than a few allergies I've had since I was a kid. Of course, I'm active, too -- but if RF at these levels was a problem, I'd *have* a problem by now.

Two servers

[Trogre]

Standard LAMP server for my environment monitoring, shared Calendar (davical, sync'd to Android gadgets, desktops, etc), data storage, web applications, email (getmail, postfix, dovecot, roundcube), etc.

Backup server (in another room from the first server), switched on by WoL each day, slurps data from server with rsync w/archival backup, waits a few minutes then shuts down.

10/100/1000 Mbps switch
ADSL modem
802.11n Access Point

That's about it from the top of my head. The server is over 12 years old and still going strong. And it draws about 50 watts. The backup server is a much more modern machine, but its power draw is negligible since it's only on for about 20 minutes per day.

Use your Coax

[bmomjian]

If you have coax in your house, you can easily run 100Mb on those coax cables with adaptors.

HP MicroServer

[steveha]

I have an HP MicroServer running Debian Stable, with several VMs running under Xen.

I love the MicroServer. Quiet, easy to work on, and inexpensive enough that I'm going to just buy a second one as a hot spare.

It doesn't support hot swapping of hard drives, but for my home use I don't need four nines reliability; powering down to swap drives is just fine for me.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107921

I run an email server with a small number of users (family and a few friends). This makes me appreciate sysadmins more.

I am planning to switch from using Xen VMs to using Docker containers.

Nobody cares, but I'll go down the inventory.

[nsayer]

I've got a cubby in bookshelf in the dining nook (most convenient spot, cable-outlet-wise) with...

Motorola SB6120
Mikrotik RB493G
Apple AirPort Extreme AC
Synology DS412+
HDHomerun

On my workbench I have a Raspberry Pi for experiments and AVR programming, and in the bedroom I've got another acting as a GPS NTP stratum 1 server.

I have a VPS offsite (obviously) doing e-mail, light web and shell duty.