Network Shennanigans!

[bernmc]

Well, after finally getting BT to sort out my phone and broadband, I've had an excuse to get my home network sorted.

I'm fortunate enough to have a new build house with cat5e cable installed.. . except that the bloody electrician hadn't connected anything up - not one phone or network socket! And all the cable ended in a dirty great fountain in the loft!

I've spent a considerable amount of time over the last two weeks tracing cables, changing single telephone sockets to dual telephone/network points, and building a new server.

Also changed my standard BT socket for an NTE5 - although of course I didn't wire it in myself, as that would be illegal ;). Bloody thing nearly had me beat but I worked it out eventually!

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New server is running M$ latest offering - Micro$oft Home Server. Needs surprisingly little (for an M$ OS!) in terms of hardware - I've got an AMD Sempron LE 1100 with 1GB of RAM (apparently it's no faster with 1GB than with 512MB, but with memeory so cheap...), along with two 500GB hard disks.

I've tried to use low power components throughout to save on the electricity bill :)

You don't even need RAID as the OS handles disk duplication automatically - as long as you 've got at least two drives. Backs up all PC's connected to it automatically every night.

Onboard gigabit ethernet plus a cheap gigabit switch means I have a pretty nifty little home network, and my family can find their files no matter which PC they're using.

All tucked away in the loft:

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And even the telly's networked....

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The media server on the server streams audio/video etc directly to the telly, so I can watch all those educational videos in glorious widescreen from the comfort of my sofa :D

Quite pleased with myself akshwully dahling!

[snickells]

Now that's how a house should be built. Have you integrated a wireless service so you can sit on the couch with a laptop?

[psbarham]

Shennanigans?:inquisiti

you daft tit, you've just networked an irish bar /pan :thinking:

[Kieran]

Shennanigans?:inquisiti

you daft tit, you've just networked an irish bar /pan :thinking:

/haz/haz/haz

[Little Miss Road Rage]

Sounds really good tho I don't understand most of it (sorry bit dense when it comes to puters) Like the sound of the back up tho.

I wonder if I could ask a question about photos. Where is the best place to store them? I have loads on CDs but they seem to have broke so I can't access them so I've lost all them and Raggy had loads on his puter but wiped the whole lot accidentally. I want a nice safe place to store them so I can keep them and not lose them and be disappointed again. Sorry to hijack your thread

[Nick VR4]

Sounds really good tho I don't understand most of it (sorry bit dense when it comes to puters) Like the sound of the back up tho.

I wonder if I could ask a question about photos. Where is the best place to store them? I have loads on CDs but they seem to have broke so I can't access them so I've lost all them and Raggy had loads on his puter but wiped the whole lot accidentally. I want a nice safe place to store them so I can keep them and not lose them and be disappointed again. Sorry to hijack your thread

Photobucket or Image Shack are pretty good so I'm told

[Brunty]

Crikey - nice.

[bernmc]

Now that's how a house should be built. Have you integrated a wireless service so you can sit on the couch with a laptop?

Yeah - Bloody Terrible home hub is wireless and has a built in internet phone as well.

Little Miss RR - all my photos are on the home server at the moment. I also have a photobucket account. I've heard very good things about FLickr though - http://www.flickr.com/ - so will be trying that as well.

[SiliconAngel]

I like to make semi-regular backups of Things I Want to Keep to DVD, Just In Case ;)

There's a saying that goes something like 'Data you don't backup is data you don't want to keep'. A HDD failure can happen at any time, without warning, as can a power surge or lightening strike which blows up all your equipment. Having a large external HDD and using windows Backup to automate daily or weekly backups of your important data is a bare minimum, but isn't particularly expensive nor difficult. Running RAID 1 or 5 is even better, but probably beyond the scope of most people's home computing needs.

Personally I'm a fan of the central always-on low power PC-as-a-home-server idea as Bern has set up. If you do it with gigabit equipment you can transfer even very large files with little perfomance hit between PCs, all your files are stored somewhere safe, they're always available, it makes backup extremely simple and gives you a central repository for all your files and movies for every PC in your home, reducing data clutter.

Nice one Bern, and you really SHOULD have sued that electrician ;)

[ANTHONY]

sorry but i must correct you but that is a NTE/5a with a NTE2000 front plate/pan

[Little Miss Road Rage]

Photobucket or Image Shack are pretty good so I'm told


Doh didn't think about them for storing photos only use them so I can post photos on Forums lol Thanks

[bernmc]

sorry but i must correct you but that is a NTE/5a with a NTE2000 front plate/pan

Look... I've had just about enough of you BT blokes... ;)

[Xeroid]

Home burnt CD's only have about a 5 year reliable life, the photosensitive layer decays with poor storage, heat mainly. Photobucket and similar sites have a size limit on pix so you can't store large hi res pix and a limit on storage space so you'd need to set up multiple accounts to try and get around that.
DVDs are better but they are still not 'archival' ie having a life of more than 50 years.
The only viable system at present is a raided server with multiple drives, minimum three I'd say. Trouble is if you like me and shoot pix seriously then I really need several Terabytes of storage. Netgear have a neat 3 Terabyte raided box on USB2.0 I think which does backup etc all automatically and there are maybe others out there but it's a growing problem for lots of amateur and professional photogs.

[bradc]

I find that having a system with 2 raid 5 arrays and a bunch of single offline drives is about as good as you can get. One raid 5 array has 6x 320gb drives, and the other has 6x 500gb drives, once you take into account the lost drive from the raid parity and the whole GB vs GiB thing, you end up with 2.3TB and 1.5TB. I then also have about 20 hard drives ranging in size from 80gb to 500gb that sit inside a hard drive shipping box that have backups of everything on the raid arrays. Should be reasonably secure :D

[Turbo_Steve]

Server at home and server at friends.
Both servers have a pair of mirrors each weighing in at around 750Gb. (and mirrored system disks of..say...80Gb)
I store stuff locally on my primary mirror.
They store stuff on their primary mirror.
Both servers are linked via VPN tunnel. They perform differential backups to each other using some fairly heavy compression, but it's okay because it's a super low priority process on the servers, and uses QoS on the servers and the routers to ensure the VPN traffic has a lower priority than regular web traffic.
RDP allows me to remote control the respective box, and windows secure storage is used to prevent anyone seeing anything they shouldn't.

Both machines also have a pair of USB drives, one attached, one on the shelf, which are changed over on Friday nights. This allows human error to not cause more than a weeks worth of loss.

Archives are also made infrequently to DVD.

I worry I still have too much risk exposure.
Paranoid?

[bradc]

Thats not a bad setup, but that would cost too much in NZ with our silly broadband plans!