NANOGers home data centers - What's in your closet?

Sat Aug 13 01:08:28 UTC 2011

In a message written on Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 06:28:57PM -0500, Charles N Wyble wrote:
> I'm curious what other NANOGers have in their home compute centers? On
> the extreme end of course we have mr morris :)
> with his uber lab: http://smorris.uber-geek.net/lab.htm

I have installed a 2 post rack in a previous house, and wired several
houses now with Cat 5E to every room.  That said, I gave up on large
amounts of equipment at home a long time ago.  Be it the power bill,
AC needs, or just plain noise from data center equipment they are
all good reasons to not have gear at home.

A quality home router is important, I've rolled my own with FreeBSD
running on a PC-Engines box, 5W, no fan, sitting on a 1000VA UPS,
it lasts for like 3+ hours when the power fails.  I've also had
luck with some Netgear boxes.  Simiarly a good WiFi box, these days
MIMO on both 2.4 and 5Ghz.  Airport Exterme or Netgear again are
good choices.  Don't want to roll your own?  Consider OpenWRT, or
CeroWRT on the right hardware.

Beyond that, a nice home file server, rsynced to something in a
real data center each night.  This a combo of backup plus high speed
access no matter which side of the home connection you are on.  I
currently use a PC I built myself, which is good, but I would like
something that uses less power.  I'm looking hard at a Mac Mini
"server", with an external RAID (perhaps 2x3TB drives, RAID 1) as
I think it will draw even less power, but I'm not sure yet.

You might notice a trend with me, low power, which means low heat
output and long runtime on UPS, fanless so no noise, small footprint.
Gotta have GigE to every room wired for desktops, printers, cameras,
TV's, playstations, etc.  Netgear 5 port switches are awesome,
lifetime warranty, small, cheap.

The holy grail I'm searching for now?  A GigE switch with POE,
unmanaged is ok, and probably preferred from a price perspective;
but with NO FAN.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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