Replacing it all

As mentioned in an earlier post, my current project has me revamping the home network. Everything that's in place has served me well, but it's time for me to get some more functionality out of everything, as well as cut down on the number of computers I have running 24/7. Considering my previous employer is also my electric company, I want them to get as little of my money as I can! Maybe not so much out of spite, but mostly 'cause I know pretty much how much money they waste every month, and dammit, I KNOW my bills could be HALF what they are now.

But, I digress...

Let's get into it. Currently, I have four computers running pretty much 24/7 at home. "Four computers for one guy, you say? Are you mad?!" Nope, just a dork. :) But, as you'll see, they each have a purpose. Well, most do:

Twoface
This is my firewall/router. (As you'll see, my network has a Batman theme. Twoface seemed appropriate for a name since it's dual-homed on my network and the Internet. A good face and a bad face. :) It's a Celeron 600 w/ 128M of RAM and a pair of hard drives, each 4G. Yup, 4G. It runs Linux. Specifically, it runs Linux From Scratch version 5.1. LFS is, by its nature, a small "distribution" as the only things installed are what you compile from scratch. I believe the total size on disk for this machine is less than 500M. I have two disks in there 'cause I like to try newer versions, and when I first set it up, I only gave it one partition of the 4G, and, really, what am I going to do with the second 4G drive?

It does a little more than just act as firewall/router, though:

Apache 2.0.48: This is setup as a reverse proxy only. My primary server, Alfred, runs IIS and has a couple of web-enable apps running. But they use their own servers, rather than the IIS on the machine. Using Apache this way, I have one external URL, but it delivers content from multiple machines. For example, if you go to www.mydomain.com, you'll get the default website on IIS running on Alfred. If you go to www.mydomain.com/homeseer, you'll get the HomeSeer web interface running on port 8000 on Alfred. www.mydomain.com/wireless gives you the web interface from my wireless router, which is obviously a totally different machine. All URLS have been changed to protect the innocent. Me. :)

Samba 2.0.something: acts as the PDC for my "domain". That's pretty much the only reason I run it.

ASSP & PopFile: provide spam filtering. I don't give out my "real" e-mail address liberally, so I really don't get a lot of spam, but I try to cut down on what little I do get. ASSP provides spam protecting on my incoming SMTP (I use no-ip.com for dynamic DNS services, more on that in another article). PopFile acts as a proxy between internal POP3 clients and outside mailboxes. I've got POP3 boxes for other things, and this "protects" them, too.

There's also a couple other things I can't think of at the moment, such as Bind for DNS.

Alfred
Alfred was originally supposed to be my "media server" (It's a server. Alfred. Server. Get it?) It's grown into being a bit more, but its original purpose still remains. It's a Dual PII-333 w/ 192M of RAM. Keep that in mind when you read what's running on it...

Windows 2000 Advanced Server: I got this soon after W2K was RTMed back in 1999. I could only get a copy of AS, so that's what I use. And, yes, it was installed over 5 years ago and hasn't been reinstalled. I hate doing that.

ShowShifter: The primary purpose of the machine. This all-in-one interface allows me to watch TV, video files, DVDs and play MP3s and audio CDs. It also acts like a PVR, but I'm on digital cable, so it hasn't seen much use in that regard. Development of SS has been exceedingly slow, and replacing it is one of the main reasons for the revamp.

HomeSeer: This is the best home automation software on the market. It's fairly feature-complete, but highly extensible via scripts and plug-ins makeing it amazingly flexible and infinitely useful. Despite the fact that this machine will be converted to Linux, I have plans to keep this around.

IIS: My primary webserver. Pretty much all of the apps I have on it, though are written in PHP. Not really much reason to use IIS then.

MySQL: Pretty good F/OSS database software. Great for home use like I use it, but its lack of mature transaction support and stored procedures make it a poor choice for the enterprise. I'll be keeping it around, though.

Subversion: For version control. I've begun playing around with it for maintaining my data on multiple machines. That's a story for another article, though.

Batman
My desktop. Already pretty much replaced, but here for historical reference. It's a PIII-1G w/ 256M of RAM running XP Pro. The guts of this machine will be used to build my new server. The mobo supports dual CPUs, but I never got around to getting one, until this week. I've also got another 512M of RAM to go into it. It's going to need it!

Batmobile
My new machine. It's a 12" Apple Powerbook G4 1.3Ghz with 512M of RAM, 80G hard drive and SuperDrive. Runs OSX 10.3.8. I bought it about six months ago...actually, to be more precise, I bought it the day before I was let go from my previous job. Fortunately, I had 6 months no payments no interest! :) I've finally gotten down to using it as my primary machine. It ain't been easy going doing the switch, but I've gotten used to some of the quirks and have plans for workaround for some of the remaining. On the whole, though, I've been happy with it. I like OSX a lot, but pretty much because the FreeBSD-based undersystem allows me to run pretty much all of the F/OSS software available without having to deal with Linux as a desktop. Tried it, hated it.

So, that tells you where I am today. Some time soon, I'll be telling you where I'm going, and why. I've got some wicked weird ideas for the future! ;-)