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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[BringsApples]

I have about 40TB of storage.

At your house???

...or your parents' basement? ;)

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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?

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 ;-)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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

[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

[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

[BringsApples]

Obviously not much pride in your post there, AC.

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?

stuff 4U

[TotalDisdain]

I just have an HP AlphaServer ES47.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

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)

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

Capital One

[Tablizer]

Same thing that's in my wallet

HP MicroServer

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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: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

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.. ;)

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.

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

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.

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

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.