Systems
You may have noticed that many of the devices on my network are named after Sesamestreet characters; in fact all of the devices are named after Sesamestreet characters. I thought it was a decent idea, and just stuck with it.
The whole thing starts with a 5 Mbit/512Kb connection from the cable company with a Motorola Surfboard 4100. From there it’s plugged into a Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router. It has been re-flashed with DD-WRT firmware to give me a few more features, and allows me to easily monitor traffic.
The most important box on the network is Grover, my Linux box (Ubuntu). It’s a Shuttle SS59G with a 3Ghz P4, 2 Gig’s of Ram and a 74 GB Raptor as it’s system drive. I have 2 750 GB USB drives plugged into it that provides network storage via Samba. The reason I went with USB is simply, the box is about the size of a shoe box and won’t hold anything substantial. Only data from first drive is shared, and the second drive simply holds a backup, made possible by rsync & cron, of the data on the first drive. I have the drives formatted as NTFS simply because if anything happens to the system, I can quickly plug them into one of my windows boxes and be on my way. Grover also handles Apache, MySql, PHP and functions as my day to day Linux box. To top off the hardware I am have a NEC DVD/CD burner and an Nvidia 7300 GT plugged into nothing, it’s completely headless.
Oscar is my heavy-lifter. I shopped around a few years ago for something that was just about server class, but wouldn’t piss off my wife. I found that Asus took one of their server boards and modified it for the “enthusiast” crowd. The PC-DL Deluxe was born. I currently have dual Xeon 2.66 Ghz chips, 4 Gig’s of Ram, dual 36 Gig Raptors (RAID 0) for the system drive, dual 40 Gig Seagates (RAID 0) for temporary storage. Two Samsung 226B’s display all the bits handled by a nVidia 6600 GT AGP card. Since I don’t game on my PC, I have no need for a high end video card and the nVidia card handle things just fine. A Turtle Beach Santa Cruz handles my audio needs, mostly just listing to music and dual NEC DVD/CD burners handle all my optical media. I have yet to throw something at this box that it couldn’t handle, 150 10MB RAW images loaded up in Lightroom doesn’t even get its heart racing.
Snuffy and Barkley are the twins. They are Dell Inspiron E1505’s and serve as my laptop and as Monk’s desktop replacement. They are only fraternal twins, running Intel Core Duo’s at 1.66, ATI X1400’s and both rocking 15.1 Ultrasharp SXGA+ displays. Monk’s has a 60 GB 7200 RPM drive with just XP, while mine is running a 160 GB 5400 RPM drive with XP and Ubuntu. All the remaining minor components, such as sound, networking, and optical drives are the same.
Split off of the 16 port switch is a line to a 5 port switch for our home entertainment center. It provides Internet connectivity for the Tivo Series 3 , X-Box, X-Box 360 and the Wii. The last port is currently unused and will go to a media center PC, should I ever get off my but at built one. A Tivo wireless adapter provides Internet connectivity to the Series2 in our bedroom.
General printing is handled by a USB HP Laserjet 1000 and honestly does about 99.9% of the printing in the house and at $40 for 5000 printed pages, will do so until it dies. I think at this point we are on our second cartridge in 5 years. The network HP Photosmart 8400 is strictly for photo printing, it actually doesn’t even get test prints sent to it and with the price of cartridge we would replace it for something cheaper in a heartbeat.
There is some smaller equipment that I didn’t include (MP3 Players, speakers, etc..) simply because there’s a bunch of it, everything from portable hard drives to digital cameras to MP3 players.
Believe it or not, but this network is the smallest network I’ve had in 10 years.