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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

Old school

[slowdeath]

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

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?

[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.)