The Home Network/Server Infrastructure Gallery..

[Sidewindr]

The NAS has 3 hi-volume fans plus the 2 redundant PSU's each have a fan, the server has 6 hi-volume fans plus another fan for each of the 2 redundant PSU's as well. The rack has 6 240v 120mm exhaust fans in the top panel. However all the fans with the exception of the 6 exhaust fans which run at 100% all the time are variable speed based on system and device temperatures.

When it's first turned on all fans go 100% for about 5-10 seconds and it's loud with the cabinet open but then they slow and with the cabinet closed there is not lot of noise as the cabinet is sealed and 95% of the air drawn out of the exhaust fans must be drawn through a panel filter in the bottom of the rear door, this creates a low pressure zone inside the rack. This also has an effect of slowing and thus reducing the noise of the exhaust fans slightly as they load up due to the drag from the rear panel filter.

The rack sits in the corner of the office diagonally opposite my workstation and the room is only air conditioned (to 25degC) when I'm in the office working, The rest of the time the room just has the door open with the windows closed no air conditioning and a desk fan used to circulate the hot air out of the room into the hallway. The room is on the 3rd floor and the hallway has an open window at one end and a bathroom with an open window at the other end providing some cross ventilation depending on how much wind is blowing but it is usually quite calm. The rack and enclosed servers CPU temps rarely exceed 15-20degC above ambient and the hard drives across the board never get more than 1-2degC above ambient.

So not too shabby, we can have 40+degC temps here in Bangkok during the dry season.

[Davothegreat]

What would you do with a bunch of 2950s at home these days? I used to have a few of them here (not running anything important, just a "nerd up" lab) but nowadays a desktop i7 has more grunt than those old servers without the power bill or the noise. For important loads, obviously a different story. Then you'd be best to collect the 2950s, flog them on the bay and pick up something that's Nehalem or Westmere based and run half the number of servers to do the same workload.

[Sidewindr]

Or do what I did, I bought a supermicro bare metal chassis with redundant PSU's etc. hot swap bays etc. and then build your own server..

DSC02017_resize.JPG

Depending on the 2950 configurations seeing you already have them you might be able to re-purpose them by replacing the motherboard/cpu/ram etc. essentially stripping them down to bar chassis with PSU/Backplane and hot swap drive bays... I chose my particular server because I wanted at least 16 drive bays for to extend my home media library capacity ..

[KeenGolfer]

I have a reasonable setup but it's nothing special to look at. Dual ADSL connections (one for work, one for play - wish I had NBN), an older quad core server with 4x 10,000 rpm drives in RAID10, 4 TB Synology NAS (8 TB in RAID 1), 16 port Netgear POE switch, 4x HD ip cameras, i5 media centre running Win7 with XBMC hooked to big screen TV with surround sound system + streaming Netflix etc. Coming today is a Pico M2 HP (thanks to another thread on here) to extend and strengthen the wireless range throughout the entire house.

[GR346]

Some very nice looking setups in here

Makes me want to spend money

[Davothegreat]

I wanted at least 16 drive bays for to extend my home media library capacity ..

How big is your library? 4TB spindles are affordable nowadays so you could run close to 50TB there (factoring in parity, FS overhead and hot spare(s)).

[Stewge]

So many rack setups!
Wish I wasn't renting, don't even have cat5/6 patching at my place, nevermind somewhere to put my gear.

My setup is more "thrown together" than most due to everything being collaborated with my housemate (we own bits and pieces).
Here's some specs of what's running at my place though:

NBN 100/40 FTTP via iiNet (500GB+500GB)
Router: Mini-ITX (Antec ISK-110 case) i3-2130, Gigabyte dual-Gbit mobo, 120GB SSD, Wifi-N with high gain antennas as access point. Running ProxmoxVE (Hypervisor), PfSense 2.1 routing virtual machine.
"Server": Xeon E3 1230v2, 16GB ram, ProxmoxVE, 1 VM for web servers/ventrilo/mumble, 1VM for downloaders (sabnzbd, transmission torrent, sickbeard, couch potato, XBMC headless library)
Storage: 2x Hotway 4-bay RAID enclosures connected with eSata, both at around 60-70% capacity. One with 4x2TB in RAID5, one with 4x4TB in RAID5. One WD 2TB USB external as ad-hoc backups and storage of VM images in-case we need to build again (or for friends).
MediaPC: i5 4570K (possible water-cooling coming soon), 8GB DDR3, GTX 580 GPU, 120GB SSD, 2TB HDD (games), Windows 8 with XBMC and Steam big picture mode/launcher. Xbox360 controller for remote.
Other: 2 TP-Link gigabit desktop switches to run things. Belkin In-line/powerboard type ups (600VA)

+1 for supermicro chassis. They make some awesome gear, use them pretty much exclusively at work for servers and routers (we build our own based on pfsense or vyatta, rather than paying the cisco tax).

Recently acquired of these bad boys in as a low-power, small-footprint multi-purpose server:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/s...5018A-MHN4.cfm

8-core Atom with quad-gigabit NIC with only 20W tdp! Runs ProxmoxVE hypervisor, vyatta core router VM, Scalix (Linux Exchange alternative) VM, Samba file-sharing (off 2x 4TB in RAID1), Windows 8 Pro VM as RDP environment in a pinch. All without breaking a sweat (on RAID1 SSDs primary drives which helps). It'll run an entire small business with <$2000 in hardware. Granted, ditching Exchange/SBS cuts hardware requirements significantly. For that money you could afford to have a 2nd as a complete spare in case of failure.
The new Rangely Atoms are surprisingly quick for their TDP. I'm increasingly looking at lower-tdp gear. Saves on power, lower cooling requirements (slower/quieter fans or completely passive), typically smaller chassis (can easily fit half-depth racks) and longer potential uptimes on UPS if power is cut. Unless you specifically need fast single-thread performance these things are great bang-for-buck.

[Sidewindr]

How big is your library? 4TB spindles are affordable nowadays so you could run close to 50TB there (factoring in parity, FS overhead and hot spare(s)).

Umm at present I have around 250 Separate TV Show Titles and 1,700 HD Movies and approximately 26,500 mp3's of music..

The NAS has 11TB capacity and the server at present has around 18TB with 8 spare drive bays for future expansion. I will probably drop 8 4TB drives into the server in the next 6 months to fill all the bays which would add an additional 24TB to the farm ..

So many rack setups!
Wish I wasn't renting, don't even have cat5/6 patching at my place, nevermind somewhere to put my gear.

I am renting The trick is to try and not move house too often .. which suits me as I hate moving house..

Those 1U chassis look good .. didn't suit me as I needed bulk drive bays and backplane speed

[Tre-Cool]

I've got a pretty simple setup at home, but I've been wanting to build a new esx server for a while and host a small play area.

At the moment I have more invested in expanding my network "reach" lol. So i have a netgear D6200 as the primary adsl modem/house wifi- which connects my office printer, desktops and netgear stora. Along with a nanostation m5 doing a 5.4ghz P2P link to another M5 on my shed. From there I have my old netgear adsl/wifi router rebroadcasting via the 2.4ghz range for internet access for my Phone and Dyno Computer which has a TPLINK AP.

Shed walls seem to block all the wireless signal from penetrating from the house so needed to do the hop/skip and jump.

.

[Black VU SS ute]

I've always been wanted to boost the wire range to get some more speed out of my 2.4ghz damn to many walls from my netgear 6300 wireless router.
I have a WD MyLive and MyCloud (3TB and 4TB) I got 161GB worth of music (31000 songs), 227 movies (hd and sd 400GB) and 1.47TB of tv shows series (5700 individual episodes). I had upgrade my old Telstra router as theit couldn't handle the hd video steaming to my smart tv, and random network drop outs.
Though I don't think I'll go as far as your setup Sidewinder.

[Sidewindr]

I've always been wanted to boost the wire range to get some more speed out of my 2.4ghz damn to many walls from my netgear 6300 wireless router.
I have a WD MyLive and MyCloud (3TB and 4TB) I got 161GB worth of music (31000 songs), 227 movies (hd and sd 400GB) and 1.47TB of tv shows series (5700 individual episodes). I had upgrade my old Telstra router as theit couldn't handle the hd video steaming to my smart tv, and random network drop outs.
Though I don't think I'll go as far as your setup Sidewinder.

I am in the process of building a live FullHD movie library (currently 1,700 movies) as a replacement for my old DVD collection (1100 DVD's) as well as all new stuff goes straight to live storage and no more static media! Many of the movies I have with really detailed CG are betwen 20Gb and 30Gb each (1080p w/ DTS-HD7.1 usually) I am only about 1/3rd of the way through replacing my DVD collection online. Still have a way to go

As far a TV goes there's around 74,000 individual episodes from around 250 separate show titles and a bunch of documentaries etc.

[Davothegreat]

I've got 155GB of music (31000 songs), 650GB of TV shows (3600 episodes), only 90GB of movies as I haven't bothered to rip any of our DVDs (not that there's that many of them, probably less than 50 titles plus box sets) and 135GB of photos (38000 images). Everything gets backed up onto one of two external drives that I rotate periodically, one lives at home, the other lives at work so I have an offsite copy of my data... encrypted of course. Couldn't care less about the music etc, it's the 5500 photos of my son that I don't want to lose.

Sidewindr, do you sync your data between the NAS and server or do you offsite the important stuff?

[Sidewindr]

Sidewindr, do you sync your data between the NAS and server or do you offsite the important stuff?

Nope, the arrays are RAID-6 and the samba file services utilise a trash can/recycle bin plugin that on deletion it moves the files to a hidden holding area and I have configured it to hold deleted items for 90 days before permanently deleting them.. I have a swag of 1.5TB drives which I am considering utilising as offline backup media as they are just collecting dust on the shelf these days

[Davothegreat]

You'd be wise to utilise that swag of spare drives, otherwise if your array fails and manages to take the drives with it (think power spike or something) then you'll lose the lot.

[QldKev]

I'm going to replace my Netcomm nb6plus4wn router, and chasing recommendations.

I'll try and list everything about this one
I can connect at 22.6mb on ADSL 2+, stats below (you will see it dropped whilst typing this message). I'm on a RIM.
The ADSL connection drops out randomly. Some days it will drop multiple times, other days it's ok. This is the main issue why I'm looking at replacing it.
If I plug a double adapter into the pone line and run a second phone drop outs become worse.
At random times I cannot even connect to the routers interface, even using cat6. The interface often is very slow to navigate if wireless uses are connected.
Samsung TV and home cinema will not connect to it wireless. They did connect for about a month and no longer talk to it. I've tried re-entering the passkey etc.
We can have 4 mobile phones and a laptop connected, but sometimes it randomly refuses to let one of them on.
We have a few pcs connected via cat6. Most are hiding behind a gigabit switch.
We have a ps3 connected via cat6 as it is very slow via wireless.
We do have a reasonable amount of downloading/gaming. (1tb allowance per month)
We have a laptop connected via a 20m cat6 that sometimes won't work on the internet with no errors.


What would be a good router to set and forget for me? No specific budget, just something that will work reliably and give decent internet speeds.

I see above the netgear D6200, but I'd be happy to grab the D6300 to get the bonus of usb ports for an external hard drive for backups. I'm not limiting any decision to any brand.


DSL Line Status

Current DSL line status is displayed as the below.

Line Mode	ADSL2+	Line State	Show Time
Line Power State	L0	Line Up Time	00:00:02:23
Line Coding	Trellis On	Line Up Count	6

Statistics	Downstream	Upstream
Line Rate	23031 Kbps	1020 Kbps
Attainable Line Rate	24744 Kbps	1163 Kbps
Noise Margin	6.5 dB	9.3 dB
Line Attenuation	22.5 dB	12.3 dB
Output Power	18.0 dBm	12.3 dBm