Went through this exercise and moved-in to our new place in May. My goals were: good future proofing, multi room audio, iPhone airplay for my wife, surround for the main tv, a home office for a guy who sometimes pokes around data projects, and as few exposed cables as possible.
What we ended up with was pretty good, but there's a couple lessons learned and things I'd do differently. First, what we did:
- dual cat6 and coax runs wherever a tv would be. 4xcat6 for bonus room/main tv - quad cat6 to home office - cat6/coax/power to outside CCTV. No plans to use it, but it's there. - conduit to bonus room/main tv - replaced all phone jacks with cat6/rj45 - pair of good speakers in main rooms and deck, wired to basement - surround, in-wall speakers in bonus room/main tv - Control4 system for automation and audio - separate receiver for the main tv - cubox-i's for xbmc. These are new, but working really well - couple control4 light switches to play around with - control4 module for the security system - Nest for thermostat - couple wemo power switches for Christmas lights - iPhone for remote, but any phone would work - good 24port managed gigabit switch. It's worth the extra few hundred bucks - 2 ASUS dark knight routers with after-market range extenders. Full bars anywhere on the block:) - rack in the basement. Keeps son out of the cabling and they're cheap secondhand - unraid NAS for media. Cheap, reliable solution $/GB - good power management
No regrets about any of this. The iPhone makes for a good universal remote and Control4 (audio/lights), the nest, our receiver, and xbmc all work great. If you wanted better integration you could probably buy a module from Control4, but I found the single controller offered a lot less than purpose-built apps.
No shortage on networking. I see fiber to the rooms being recommended, but they're already testing 10Gbit over cat6 so I was content to settle on copper. I figured it's a risk either way, there's always the potential for a new standard of cable in a couple years so conduit where it counts and practical for the rest. We don't use all the jacks right now, but they're cheaper at build than fishing cables after the fact.
The audio is also very good for a closed system like Control4. It'll read your library and has modules for services like Rhapsody which my wife uses regularly. I opted for a separate Yamaha for the main tv for better sound, plus I'm not spending a bunch of money on a Control4 locked-in video switcher in the basement. XBMC does a fine job sharing media and it's easy enough for non-techies like babysitting grandparents to figure out.
I'm not pleased with the two Control4 light switches. They use a Zigbee wireless system that has range issues unless you wire enough switches in your house for coverage, and are ridiculously expensive (almost $200 pretty switch!). It's neat being able to turn on the lights on my iPhone, but definitely not worth the price. MyUbe.co is promising sub-$60 light switches this spring that are rip and replace with app and an open API, so I'm keeping an eye on this as a future solution.
Two things I'd definitely have done differently knowing what I now do:
1) get more power. We've filled the breaker box and have been told will need another line from the city if we ever need more power. For a guy familiar with servers and power consumption this was pretty dumb on my part. Calculate your power needs before they trench your utility lines, or have them run one before the house is built. Our options for more power in the future are looking expensive, and a little planning could have saved that.
2) comparison shop your automation vendors, including multiple resellers of the same product. We picked Control4 with the builder's recommended vendor because they had a mature app and most of the features we wanted at the time, with what looked like good future options. This was a poor choice. The reseller intentionally misled us to
Unless they're pounding the entire subnet for some reason, only hitting machines whose ping responds.
Most folks that'd DDOS you aren't that sophisticated, and if they are there's really nothing you can do until someone decides to focus their malice elsewhere.
The best bet for the poster is mitigation. Talk to the ISP, let them know the situation, and start feeding them a list of IPs to block at their head-end. While you as a client only have X bandwidth before it overwhelms your DSL, they have X^n and are usually amenable to blocking malicious traffic before it screws-up all the clients in an area.
But, to repeat what's already been said. If the attack's following you to new IPs your only bet is: - Factory reset the router, then plug it (and only it) in. - Have it get a fresh IP - Wait 30 minutes and see if an attack starts - Plug-in a known safe device to check the router. Fixed devices like an iPhone or Android phone should work (unlikely that's what's compromised). - Use the device to check the router and see what kind of traffic is happening - Slowly start reconnecting your devices, one at a time, waiting a safe amount of time in between each.
If the router starts getting hammered without anything connected you could have a compromised router. Just last year thousands of routers were compromised that had too simple a password and remote access enabled.
If it starts after a certain device is plugged-in, time to track-down the culprit or (better) format the compromised machine. You're probably safe 90% of the time, but one a machine is rooted it's a good policy to never trust it.
If the router is getting traffic and you know it's safe, then you might be seeing an attack on your network segment. Only your ISP can help.
CS knowledge absolutely drives the real world. Sure, big data or HTML might not be sexy things for an IT booth, but there's plenty of real-world ideas:
- Make 2 groups: one to write real-world instructions, the other to enact them. Have them write down how to tie shoelaces, that's always fun and eye-opening. - Programmable robots. Lego Mindstorms isn't expensive, and you've probably been waiting for an excuse to buy this yourself for years:) - Any math or logic games. You've heard of the water buckets to fill X with Y water using what's on hand.
And that's only the software side. You're right that most hardware isn't easily modified these days, but if PC towers are boring there's always home and personal electronics. Taking apart, cleaning, and reassembling everything from laptops to your old xbox still needs IT experience. It might not make you more employable, but it'll give your kids a chance to think twice about what they can do to prolong the life of their digital stuff before it gets tossed.
The date is far enough out that folks will have forgotten this report by then. It's one of those hopeful dates meaning "in our lifetime", just like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Trek.
Might well be accurate though, as I understand it we'll be getting self-driving technology from the Vulcans shortly after the eugenics wars.
I get your point that for the majority of people it's not worth your time to setup a web server when a thousand providers offer good service for the price of a specialty coffee. But, when I was 16 I wanted to learn about the WWW, Linux, and CGI, and a local web server with Perl let me host some friend's sites. Nowadays I still have a web server at home plus three racks in our DC for projects.
Controlling your hardware and OS is a good learning environment, plus complete control over things that might cost way more than $4/mo. I learned a lot about tweaking hardware and network security by having to do it early on. Today I use a home web server for some automation projects whose hardware needs physical access to the devices it manages.
So, in short, lots of reasons to host at home. Not even high-bandwidth-for-cheap ones.
I came across My Fitness Pal after syncing it to a Withings scale I'd bought. As a data guy this has taken all the fuzziness and cheating out of weight loss. It's great. Calories and nutritional info is recorded, the scale syncs automatically after measuring (just stand on it, no data entry), and I'm getting their version of Fitbit, called Pulse, to help track exercise and sleep.
I think most Slashdotters who sometimes struggle with weight won't get much more out of a book they haven't scoured Google for already. Easily being able to visualize personal info seems to really help with the accountability part, which I think is way more important to the knowledge-savvy crowd.
As a web host I can tell you this is coming from the wrong angle, there's no "Large Non-profit" package I could sell you that'd make you happy within your budget. $15/mo general web hosting has capacity limits by design. Ultra-redundant with a 24/7 team of on-call remote hands and the full rack of dedicated hardware that comes with it may not be a smart use of your org's money. Hopefully these will help you better flush-out your solution:
Consider your needs in three categories: 1) Infrastructure. - What does it take to drive your site? - What's your uptime requirement? - What OS/Software/Hardware are you running on now? - What does traffic look like today? 5 years from now? - What bottlenecks/problems are you experiencing?
2) Support. - When things break who's the first person that gets called? Who's the second? - Who will maintain the infrastructure (security patches, hardware updates, etc.) - How important is it that you get personal, escalated support at 3am?
3) Cost. - What's the budget for a Large Non-profit? $3/mo, $30/mo, $30,000/mo? - What price point can you realistically sell your board?
Typically at least two of these will drive your needs for the third. As a Large organization you're probably looking at 1 & 2, then selling 3 to the board. That can be a whole other mess, but a well designed needs document and a decsion-maker friend to bounce ideas off can work wonders. Make sure to flush out the why, "what happens if we don't", and alternate options for these points, which are by no means comprehensive for your project.
Also consider having a developer sit-in on the needs assessment. 1000 people at a time doesn't mean much with no context of the site. It's been mentioned above: is that 1000 people browsing pure html, 1000 people on a heavily-optimized PHP site, or 1000 people running data intensive operations (like multi-million row searches)? I've personally brought down big servers with crappy PHP code, and run 1000+ active vBulletin forums on 10 year old whitebox servers. It's all in how you identify and address bottlenecks, and a trusted developer can make that process easier.
Content arguments aside, 500/mo for a 72TB server on a 1Gb connection is losing money for someone else's business. Even without redundancy you wouldn't make your money back on hardware for years, and that's before any support.
On the other hand, the child with the smaller brain on the right will be more likely to become addicted to drugs, be involved in violent crimes, be unemployed and dependent on government benefits in the future.
Also, really? Phrenology much? This dumps credibility down the toilet pretty quick.
Mr. Burns: Of course you'd say that. You have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter.
RAM has a history of starting expensive for cutting-edge, getting dirt cheap as it becomes mainstream, then the old stuff gets expensive again when the market moves-on and it's in limited use. If an EBay search doesn't offer good value then most parts can be recycled these days, check with your local recycling center to see if they have a program to reclaim component materials.
Or, if you're looking for a laugh, ehow says you should consider making a sculpture. With the amount of RAM coming out of companies I bet you could do something person-sized:)
If he'd stopped at saying: "I own 50% of Facebook" it'd probably be protected speech. Crazy, pitied, ridiculous speech, but free and protected nonetheless.
Once opinion becomes action (like the lawsuit) you're damaging someone. The harm those actions commit should never be considered free speech because even damage on paper has a real effect on someone's life.
-Matt
(Billionaire's problems, I know, but the biggest downside of democracy is you spend most of your time defending scoundrels)
Parent poster basically won the internet award for the day, heed his words.
Programming at it's core is creative work, and if that's what you love you need to stick with it a form that fulfills your passion and talents. For example, with your time in the field consider if you have what it takes to do more senior development work:
- it's not management though you will be responsible for code review and progress meetings - you're less code-monkey and more architect which lessens the burden of bringing peak knowledge of new languages to the table
Q/A is also a relatively good side of things to consider. You need a functional understanding of code, but the work focus is shifted to your analysis skills on how real-world scenarios will beat the living tar out of someone's project:)
At this stage you're going to want to recognize your experience with software and the environments they run in as much as being able to make f(x)=y. It's very honest to recognize that you're not a people person, but that doesn't mean well-paying specialist jobs like what's above are out of your reach.
"And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!"
Pretty good chance he is relaxing and enjoying his wealth... by running Facebook:)
Really, how many people took a college project and made a billion dollars with it? I'll bet like Jobs or Bezos that Zuckerberg is exactly where he wants to be: keeping his hands on the steering wheel of a project that excites him....Except now he can afford a couple more sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads.
Slashdot Mirror
Went through this exercise and moved-in to our new place in May. My goals were: good future proofing, multi room audio, iPhone airplay for my wife, surround for the main tv, a home office for a guy who sometimes pokes around data projects, and as few exposed cables as possible.
What we ended up with was pretty good, but there's a couple lessons learned and things I'd do differently. First, what we did:
- dual cat6 and coax runs wherever a tv would be. 4xcat6 for bonus room/main tv :)
- quad cat6 to home office
- cat6/coax/power to outside CCTV. No plans to use it, but it's there.
- conduit to bonus room/main tv
- replaced all phone jacks with cat6/rj45
- pair of good speakers in main rooms and deck, wired to basement
- surround, in-wall speakers in bonus room/main tv
- Control4 system for automation and audio
- separate receiver for the main tv
- cubox-i's for xbmc. These are new, but working really well
- couple control4 light switches to play around with
- control4 module for the security system
- Nest for thermostat
- couple wemo power switches for Christmas lights
- iPhone for remote, but any phone would work
- good 24port managed gigabit switch. It's worth the extra few hundred bucks
- 2 ASUS dark knight routers with after-market range extenders. Full bars anywhere on the block
- rack in the basement. Keeps son out of the cabling and they're cheap secondhand
- unraid NAS for media. Cheap, reliable solution $/GB
- good power management
No regrets about any of this. The iPhone makes for a good universal remote and Control4 (audio/lights), the nest, our receiver, and xbmc all work great. If you wanted better integration you could probably buy a module from Control4, but I found the single controller offered a lot less than purpose-built apps.
No shortage on networking. I see fiber to the rooms being recommended, but they're already testing 10Gbit over cat6 so I was content to settle on copper. I figured it's a risk either way, there's always the potential for a new standard of cable in a couple years so conduit where it counts and practical for the rest. We don't use all the jacks right now, but they're cheaper at build than fishing cables after the fact.
The audio is also very good for a closed system like Control4. It'll read your library and has modules for services like Rhapsody which my wife uses regularly. I opted for a separate Yamaha for the main tv for better sound, plus I'm not spending a bunch of money on a Control4 locked-in video switcher in the basement. XBMC does a fine job sharing media and it's easy enough for non-techies like babysitting grandparents to figure out.
I'm not pleased with the two Control4 light switches. They use a Zigbee wireless system that has range issues unless you wire enough switches in your house for coverage, and are ridiculously expensive (almost $200 pretty switch!). It's neat being able to turn on the lights on my iPhone, but definitely not worth the price. MyUbe.co is promising sub-$60 light switches this spring that are rip and replace with app and an open API, so I'm keeping an eye on this as a future solution.
Two things I'd definitely have done differently knowing what I now do:
1) get more power. We've filled the breaker box and have been told will need another line from the city if we ever need more power. For a guy familiar with servers and power consumption this was pretty dumb on my part. Calculate your power needs before they trench your utility lines, or have them run one before the house is built. Our options for more power in the future are looking expensive, and a little planning could have saved that.
2) comparison shop your automation vendors, including multiple resellers of the same product. We picked Control4 with the builder's recommended vendor because they had a mature app and most of the features we wanted at the time, with what looked like good future options. This was a poor choice. The reseller intentionally misled us to
I've bought over 40 of these and yet to see one die that wasn't from trying to skip steps flashing it. Even then they're recoverable.
By far the best consumer router out there IMHO.
Unless they're pounding the entire subnet for some reason, only hitting machines whose ping responds.
Most folks that'd DDOS you aren't that sophisticated, and if they are there's really nothing you can do until someone decides to focus their malice elsewhere.
The best bet for the poster is mitigation. Talk to the ISP, let them know the situation, and start feeding them a list of IPs to block at their head-end. While you as a client only have X bandwidth before it overwhelms your DSL, they have X^n and are usually amenable to blocking malicious traffic before it screws-up all the clients in an area.
But, to repeat what's already been said. If the attack's following you to new IPs your only bet is:
- Factory reset the router, then plug it (and only it) in.
- Have it get a fresh IP
- Wait 30 minutes and see if an attack starts
- Plug-in a known safe device to check the router. Fixed devices like an iPhone or Android phone should work (unlikely that's what's compromised).
- Use the device to check the router and see what kind of traffic is happening
- Slowly start reconnecting your devices, one at a time, waiting a safe amount of time in between each.
If the router starts getting hammered without anything connected you could have a compromised router. Just last year thousands of routers were compromised that had too simple a password and remote access enabled.
If it starts after a certain device is plugged-in, time to track-down the culprit or (better) format the compromised machine. You're probably safe 90% of the time, but one a machine is rooted it's a good policy to never trust it.
If the router is getting traffic and you know it's safe, then you might be seeing an attack on your network segment. Only your ISP can help.
-Matt
CS knowledge absolutely drives the real world. Sure, big data or HTML might not be sexy things for an IT booth, but there's plenty of real-world ideas:
- Make 2 groups: one to write real-world instructions, the other to enact them. Have them write down how to tie shoelaces, that's always fun and eye-opening. :)
- Programmable robots. Lego Mindstorms isn't expensive, and you've probably been waiting for an excuse to buy this yourself for years
- Any math or logic games. You've heard of the water buckets to fill X with Y water using what's on hand.
And that's only the software side. You're right that most hardware isn't easily modified these days, but if PC towers are boring there's always home and personal electronics. Taking apart, cleaning, and reassembling everything from laptops to your old xbox still needs IT experience. It might not make you more employable, but it'll give your kids a chance to think twice about what they can do to prolong the life of their digital stuff before it gets tossed.
The date is far enough out that folks will have forgotten this report by then. It's one of those hopeful dates meaning "in our lifetime", just like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Trek.
Might well be accurate though, as I understand it we'll be getting self-driving technology from the Vulcans shortly after the eugenics wars.
I get your point that for the majority of people it's not worth your time to setup a web server when a thousand providers offer good service for the price of a specialty coffee. But, when I was 16 I wanted to learn about the WWW, Linux, and CGI, and a local web server with Perl let me host some friend's sites. Nowadays I still have a web server at home plus three racks in our DC for projects.
Controlling your hardware and OS is a good learning environment, plus complete control over things that might cost way more than $4/mo. I learned a lot about tweaking hardware and network security by having to do it early on. Today I use a home web server for some automation projects whose hardware needs physical access to the devices it manages.
So, in short, lots of reasons to host at home. Not even high-bandwidth-for-cheap ones.
I came across My Fitness Pal after syncing it to a Withings scale I'd bought. As a data guy this has taken all the fuzziness and cheating out of weight loss. It's great. Calories and nutritional info is recorded, the scale syncs automatically after measuring (just stand on it, no data entry), and I'm getting their version of Fitbit, called Pulse, to help track exercise and sleep.
I think most Slashdotters who sometimes struggle with weight won't get much more out of a book they haven't scoured Google for already. Easily being able to visualize personal info seems to really help with the accountability part, which I think is way more important to the knowledge-savvy crowd.
Didn't you know? (Soylent) Green energy IS hippies.
It's an arms race. The better the detector, the better the spammer, the better the detector...
But, can you imagine how good sarcasm would get if they started treating it the same way? Words so powerful they could melt your screen!
As a web host I can tell you this is coming from the wrong angle, there's no "Large Non-profit" package I could sell you that'd make you happy within your budget. $15/mo general web hosting has capacity limits by design. Ultra-redundant with a 24/7 team of on-call remote hands and the full rack of dedicated hardware that comes with it may not be a smart use of your org's money. Hopefully these will help you better flush-out your solution:
Consider your needs in three categories:
1) Infrastructure.
- What does it take to drive your site?
- What's your uptime requirement?
- What OS/Software/Hardware are you running on now?
- What does traffic look like today? 5 years from now?
- What bottlenecks/problems are you experiencing?
2) Support.
- When things break who's the first person that gets called? Who's the second?
- Who will maintain the infrastructure (security patches, hardware updates, etc.)
- How important is it that you get personal, escalated support at 3am?
3) Cost.
- What's the budget for a Large Non-profit? $3/mo, $30/mo, $30,000/mo?
- What price point can you realistically sell your board?
Typically at least two of these will drive your needs for the third. As a Large organization you're probably looking at 1 & 2, then selling 3 to the board. That can be a whole other mess, but a well designed needs document and a decsion-maker friend to bounce ideas off can work wonders. Make sure to flush out the why, "what happens if we don't", and alternate options for these points, which are by no means comprehensive for your project.
Also consider having a developer sit-in on the needs assessment. 1000 people at a time doesn't mean much with no context of the site. It's been mentioned above: is that 1000 people browsing pure html, 1000 people on a heavily-optimized PHP site, or 1000 people running data intensive operations (like multi-million row searches)? I've personally brought down big servers with crappy PHP code, and run 1000+ active vBulletin forums on 10 year old whitebox servers. It's all in how you identify and address bottlenecks, and a trusted developer can make that process easier.
Hope this helps. Good luck with your search.
It's fine, they're not Norwegian
Starring Eugene Levy as Darth Vader, the dad still trying to be cool.
"We'll just tell your mother we used the force"
Content arguments aside, 500/mo for a 72TB server on a 1Gb connection is losing money for someone else's business. Even without redundancy you wouldn't make your money back on hardware for years, and that's before any support.
On the other hand, the child with the smaller brain on the right will be more likely to become addicted to drugs, be involved in violent crimes, be unemployed and dependent on government benefits in the future.
Also, really? Phrenology much? This dumps credibility down the toilet pretty quick.
Mr. Burns: Of course you'd say that. You have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter.
RAM has a history of starting expensive for cutting-edge, getting dirt cheap as it becomes mainstream, then the old stuff gets expensive again when the market moves-on and it's in limited use. If an EBay search doesn't offer good value then most parts can be recycled these days, check with your local recycling center to see if they have a program to reclaim component materials.
Or, if you're looking for a laugh, ehow says you should consider making a sculpture. With the amount of RAM coming out of companies I bet you could do something person-sized :)
If he'd stopped at saying: "I own 50% of Facebook" it'd probably be protected speech. Crazy, pitied, ridiculous speech, but free and protected nonetheless.
Once opinion becomes action (like the lawsuit) you're damaging someone. The harm those actions commit should never be considered free speech because even damage on paper has a real effect on someone's life.
-Matt
(Billionaire's problems, I know, but the biggest downside of democracy is you spend most of your time defending scoundrels)
"A vote for anyone but the tooth fairy and you're just throwing it away"
"I will donate $5 million to charity if Ms. Fairy can prove she's a dentist"
"This election is not about teeth, but the people whose mouths use them!"
I like where this could go. Cracked had great coverage on Brazil's elections that probably have someone running as the tooth fairy :)
-Matt
Surprise? There is none.
Only as long as I'd misread that as OnStar.
Unless your name is Akamai, what purely streaming company is valued at $1.8bn?
-Matt
Parent poster basically won the internet award for the day, heed his words.
Programming at it's core is creative work, and if that's what you love you need to stick with it a form that fulfills your passion and talents. For example, with your time in the field consider if you have what it takes to do more senior development work:
- it's not management though you will be responsible for code review and progress meetings
- you're less code-monkey and more architect which lessens the burden of bringing peak knowledge of new languages to the table
Q/A is also a relatively good side of things to consider. You need a functional understanding of code, but the work focus is shifted to your analysis skills on how real-world scenarios will beat the living tar out of someone's project :)
At this stage you're going to want to recognize your experience with software and the environments they run in as much as being able to make f(x)=y. It's very honest to recognize that you're not a people person, but that doesn't mean well-paying specialist jobs like what's above are out of your reach.
-Matt
With all the innuendo around Barry White's voice, if this man can sing he'd be a real crowd pleaser!
-Matt
"And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!"
Change we can believe in.
Pretty good chance he is relaxing and enjoying his wealth... by running Facebook :)
Really, how many people took a college project and made a billion dollars with it? I'll bet like Jobs or Bezos that Zuckerberg is exactly where he wants to be: keeping his hands on the steering wheel of a project that excites him. ...Except now he can afford a couple more sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads.
-Matt
This tablet was perfectly created a week ago as-is on the developer's desk, it did not evolve over years like the iPad.
-Matt
They should have recorded a song about discovering the Higgs Boson, then prepared to sue anyone who discovered it first.
(not really, but the nerd in me would pay 0.99 on iTunes to fund their Super Collider music)
-Matt
31 minutes since my last comment? I hope I am not overwhelming the infrastructure here!
How often do you use this line? :)
-Matt