ping

The Basic Infrastructure

Connectivity

The centrepiece in my infrastructure is a Linksys WRT54G router/firewall/switch/wifi access-point. Definitely recommended! It has been extremely reliable. For some years now, I’ve been using the DD-WRT third-party firmware with it. Be aware that if bought as new I would recommend buying the WRT54GL. The current “normal” WRT54G does not use Linux but VxWorks does not contain the amount of memory that the GL version has and it is not as simple to apply third-party firmware to it. For more information about the different versions that exist of the WRT54G, see this Wikipedia article.

The router is connected to an ADSL modem (of course it isn’t really a modem but it seems to be the accepted terminology) which in turn connects me to BT (British Telecom). The ADSL modem is an X-Modem M3 from ADSL Nation.

Down and up-stream speeds of the ADSL service are 2Mbit and 256 Kbit/sec respectively. The ISP (BT) and the bandwidth is not my choice as such. I work for IBM and am considered a mobile worker, IBM therefore connects me and pays my ADSL connection.

The server and the laptop I use are connected by ordinary ethernet cables as they are in the same room as the switch. Other systems are connected via PCI WLAN cards with a (theoretic) bandwidth of 54 Mbit/sec.

The Server Hardware

I used to use old PCs that I or extended family members no longer used as workstations, wiped them and “converted” them to server duty. Eventually the services I put on the server(s) became something I relied on so downtime became a real nuisance. The homework of the kids would usually be stored on the server so it usually wasn’t an option to wait for the weekend to arrive before getting the server up and running again if for whatever reason it had gone down. When home servers are used primarily as file servers, the performance is usually not that important, but I increasingly used webserver-based applications and the performance of the machines I used as servers therefore did become an issue. At one stage I had a server setup of two machines where most of the resource intensive programs were running on a laptop which via NFS then used the disk-storage of an old desktop so if, for whatever reason, one machine was down I effectively had no server. I ended up spending too much time keeping these old machines in the air.
Eventually I bought a real server, a Dell PowerEdge 830 equipped with a dual-core 3GHz Pentium 4, 1 GB ECC (Error Correcting Code) RAM and two 300 GB harddisks configured in a RAID-1 array (mirrored disks). This system has performed flawlessly and, other than externally inflicted power cuts or software maintenance (updades necessitating reboots), it has had no downtime.

I would definitely recommend some kind of file-storage in a home network. If you have the skills use a “real” server as adding additional services are possible, otherwise get a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device of some kind. Examples would be the Linksys NSLU2 or the Buffalo TeraStation. I haven’t used any of them, but if I were to go down that route, I would look at getting one of those.

Operating System

On servers I have always used RedHat Linux or a derivative thereof. When Fedora Core came out, I started using that, but I don’t really care to be on the bleeding edge on the server. I want it to be reliable. Fedora Core is updated too often for my server needs. For a server you want something that is security updated for an extended period. a couple of times I found that the version I was using was no longer updat and I didn’t really have the time to perform a major software update of everything. That sort of thing requires backups in case it doesn’t work afterwards, so it is a time-consuming task. Today I use CentOS and I have version 4 installed. The people behind CentOS use the source RPM files that RedHat publish and compile them, ending up with a Linux distribution that for all intents and purposes is identical to RedHat Enterprise Linux, but free.

No comments yet.

Leave a comment