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My Home Network

February 18th, 2008 · Comments

One question that I try to ask during every interview (and I interview a *lot* of people), is “Tell me about your home network”. You find out a lot about someone’s geeky disposition from this question. Are they the kind of person who is just doing their job, or are they genuinely interested in technology? Is computing a tool, or a hobby? It’s been a little over 5 years since I’ve posted a home network diagram, so I refreshed it:

The core of the home network is rear.sprocket.io, which acts as a firewall, IDS, DHCP, and file server, and runs FreeBSD 8.0. It’s also managing backups for us using ZFS with compression, but that broke recently. It’s got a Canon S300 printer hooked up to it, but I can’t seem to get CUPS to play well with other machines at the moment, so it may as well be elsewhere.

The primary desktop machines are counter.sprocket.io and dallas-laptop, which is me and my wife’s machine respectively. These are the machines we sit and read blogs with and play in Adobe Lightroom on. I also have a couple of virtual machine instances running through VMware Fusion.

chum and tank are two of the newest additions to our network. chum is a Chumby that lives in our bathroom, which sits there and displays a feed of my favorite news, photo, and weather sites all day long. tank is a OLPC XO-1 Laptop that roams about everywhere. It’s my mobile web browsing machine. It’s currently set to run the Sugar UI, but for speed, I find fluxbox & opera to work a bit better on it.

rusty is my old Sun Ultra 5 I bought at an auction, which runs NetBSD 4.0. It’s supposed to be my network monitoring machine, but I still haven’t gotten around to it. marine (SGI Octane), ferrum (IBM RS/6000 43P-140), and broken (HP Visualize B2000) are testing machines that remain powered off most of the time. While all of these machines are old and obsolete, they run UNIX operating systems that I can’t run virtually. When I write new systems administration tools, I like to verify it’s portability on uncommon platforms. It’s just not fiscally or environmentally responsible to leave machines on that I don’t use but once or twice a year.

So, what’s your home network look like?

Tags: technology

Viewing 7 Comments

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    The main bits about disk performance I get concerned about is when I need to do things like indexing my backup drive (say, find . -ls > INDEX) or doing massive greps.

    I do some space optimization as well: I'm using ZFS compression (GZIP-9) which saves me about 10% of the disk space, and link together duplicate files, which saves me another 10% or so (wild guess?). Considering how rocky ZFS has been for me under FreeBSD, I'm not sure it's been worth it.

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    Thanks for the 'grats.

    The LaCie drive has been quite acceptable performance wise. Apparently it uses an XFS drive format. Transfer speeds over our gigabit network seem good, although to be honest I haven't actually bothered to run any tests to see just how fast it is yet.

    As I said previously, the main reasons for buying it was that it's quiet and the footprint is not much larger than a video cassette standing on the side.

    There have been no stability issues, even when I was experimenting with hot swapping various USB drives in formats it couldn't recognise.

    The good news with these devices is that you can add external USB drives for extra storage. Providing the drive is not already partitioned and formatted in a way the device can't read, it will automatically structure the drive and make it available as a share.

    It's present as an SMB and AFP device on the network with Bonjour, (and FTP) so all the systems can access it quite nicely and it's discovered by the Macs automatically which is handy for familiarising the wife with accessing network shares on her new Mac.

    It can also be used as a media server for various "set top" devices and apparently it can host your iTunes library for these devices to access. So far we've not gone for one of these devices as I'm still trying to decide between AppleTV, another Mac Mini, or one of the aforementioned devices, to connect to the TV in the living room. I think AppleTV is going to be the way we go with the recent changes they've made to it.

    You mentioned you were tempted by disk performance, what sort of things do you do that demand that extra performance? Do you work with your photos on the remote disk?

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    Congrats on the upcoming addition to your family! How has the LaCie NAS worked out for you?

    I keep getting tempted by some of the NAS setups, but every once in a blue moon get tempted by local disk performance for certain activities. Nowadays I'm stuck to ZFS because I like the compression for my backup disks.

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    This is my home network diagram.

    I do find a certain geeky enjoyment in looking over different setups that people have, I'm not sure that mine's all that interesting but I thought I'd return the favour and give a diagram to look over.

    http://img180.imageshack.us/im...

    The text details:

    FYI, It's just me and the wife (and a newly born son in a few days hopefully) living here!

    The main network file server is the LaCie NAS device which replaces a FreeBSD mini-itx system due to the small footprint, quietness and presence of gigabit ethernet.

    The main switch is a managed 10/100/1000 HP Procurve 8 port switch which connects to the router to the outside world (A ZyXEL Prestige series) and a Belkin Wireless Access Point. I do intend to upgrade this AP to an HP Procurve soon as we've recently moved to a larger house and no longer find the Belkin provides adequate coverage for our laptops which are only occasionally used (hence not diagrammed).

    These laptops are 3x HP units running Windows XP and 1 Toshiba Portegé running FreeBSD.

    The main desktop systems in use are the iMac (used by me) and the Mac mini which my wife has recently switched to.

    The iMac in addition to it's internal 320GB storage has an external 750GB Firewire drive attached and a 1TB drive for time machine backup.

    The Mac mini is connected to an HP Photosmart 3110 Printer.

    SHODAN is my backup windows gaming machine, to occasionally play games which I can't get running under Mac OS X.

    DeepBlue is the recently made redundant PC which my wife used to use. She's a teacher for early years and finds the Mac mini nicer to use and even now prefers to do her work in NeoOffice over Microsoft Office.

    Peripherally, we have a Nintendo Wii connected wirelessly from the living room for updates and browsing from the TV.

    We have a wireless camera with sound set up in the nursery to act as a baby monitor for our newly born son.

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    Here it is. The wireless connections are also IPSec tunnels, which explains the router in the entertainment center network.

    http://caerleon.us/home_net.pd...

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    If you like -- diagrams take some time, so a textual summary of your configuration would work too! :)

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    I probably have you beaten, perhaps not in number of machines but in network complexity. I still need to diagram the thing at some point, perhaps some time this week.

    If you're interested in seeing it, let me know. I'll likely be doing it in OpenOffice Draw, and apparently it does a PDF export which would be handy for that.

 

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