Gadgetman: Holiday Home Network Upgrades

Due to some upgrades to most of the workstations in my household, mainly due to Christmas time purchases, I have been left with three spare computers; two workstations plus one laptop. These have been designated to be part of a whole network upgrade for a few months now, and with time off over Christmas I was able to get some of this done.

My current LAN consists of 4 workstations (now all Mac’s!) and 3 servers (actually 2 and an Untangle gateway), plus 2 broadband connections (ADSL2+ and Woosh) plus a wireless access point, and of course a switch to tie them all together. Now most of this has been thrown together over the years and whilst the core infrastructure worked, there were ongoing problems with the workstations, including stability, disk space, noise and poor performance. Hence the decision to upgrade.

We already had one Mac in the house, a two year old MacBook, and it has been a great machine, it hardly ever needs rebooting (except for the occasional upgrades) and it does 90% of which we all needed; the other 10% can be handled either by Boot Camp or by virtualisation by way of Virtual Box.

So, seeing as the current servers are noisy rack-mount boxes (which seemed like a good idea at the time!) the plan was to replace them all with something small and quiet, consisting of Shuttle machines. These are great little boxes, I have had one as a HTPC for over three years, but that too is destined to be upgraded.

Freeing the Shuttle from the lounge meant the removal of one rack server, and the temporary use of another replaced workstation meant the second rack server was gone. The result – a marked reduction in noise! And of course some power savings from not having all those high speed fans!

Next step is to buy another Shuttle, then after that replace the network switch, which also being rack-mounted has an annoyingly loud fan.

The final step is to replace my WHS (Windows Home Server) with an HP E510, a fine small home server, which you can read about in my blogs.

If this is confusing, here’s a table:

Machine	Current Use	New Use
Shuttle	HTPC	Untangle Gateway
P4 Workstation	Games Machine	Windows Home Server
Shuttle (to buy)	n/a	Print/Backup/Torrent Server
3COM 16port Switch	Main Switch	Sell to fund replacement!

So, that’s a total of 3 new servers and a switch, all resulting in a much quieter household!