Of data and networks
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I mentioned recently that I'd reinstalled my main dev box to move it from W2K to XP due to some projects I'm working on. My reward? The box that served faithfully and provided a stable and productive environment for development under W2K now runs slower than my grandmother's Pontiac. I've been at this for long enough to realize that new versions of Windows seldom offer anything more than a reason to buy a new computer. Well done, Microsoft / Intel / AMD. Your evil scheme is working perfectly. Having just bought a new laptop a month ago, I was less than excited about spending yet more money on computers. They were sexy when I was young. Now they're just appliances. Since I basically just needed more processing speed & memory, I snagged one of Dell's $350 dimensions. Of course, it was closer to $600 after I bumped it to 2 gigs of memory, but still a decent deal. This box only has room for one SATA hard drive, and the stock was 80 gigs. No problem, I thought. I'll just swap it out with one of the 300 gig drives from another machine. Then I popped the top. They have it buried such that it's extremely major surgery just to reach it. And what little I could see of it, I wasn't entirely sure that it was even a standard mounting scenario. These boxes are clearly meant to be purchased and run - not exactly a tweakable box. I put the lid back on and started installing it. In addition to a couple of laptops, my network now has 5 boxes with a fair amount of available hard disk space to go around. Given that the Dell is not friendly to swapping components, I figured that the 80 gigs should be sufficient to install applications, with only a modest amount left over for local data. No problem, there's tons of storage space on the network. At this point I realized I had what is probably a stupid and unjustified twitch. I'm used to having all my personal, business and development data on the local hard drive of the machine I'm working on. Now, there's not really room for that, which means that I have to work over, (gasp!) the network. Even as I felt that reaction I knew it was silly. With a 100 mbit network, it's not exactly pokey. And yet, there's this odd anxiety about not having the data on the local box. Any of you ever encounter such foundless and nagging little insecurities about such things, or is it just my misspent youth coming back to haunt me? Also, for those of you with significant home network environments, I'd be interested in your strategies for organizing & managing data, servers, etc.
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I mentioned recently that I'd reinstalled my main dev box to move it from W2K to XP due to some projects I'm working on. My reward? The box that served faithfully and provided a stable and productive environment for development under W2K now runs slower than my grandmother's Pontiac. I've been at this for long enough to realize that new versions of Windows seldom offer anything more than a reason to buy a new computer. Well done, Microsoft / Intel / AMD. Your evil scheme is working perfectly. Having just bought a new laptop a month ago, I was less than excited about spending yet more money on computers. They were sexy when I was young. Now they're just appliances. Since I basically just needed more processing speed & memory, I snagged one of Dell's $350 dimensions. Of course, it was closer to $600 after I bumped it to 2 gigs of memory, but still a decent deal. This box only has room for one SATA hard drive, and the stock was 80 gigs. No problem, I thought. I'll just swap it out with one of the 300 gig drives from another machine. Then I popped the top. They have it buried such that it's extremely major surgery just to reach it. And what little I could see of it, I wasn't entirely sure that it was even a standard mounting scenario. These boxes are clearly meant to be purchased and run - not exactly a tweakable box. I put the lid back on and started installing it. In addition to a couple of laptops, my network now has 5 boxes with a fair amount of available hard disk space to go around. Given that the Dell is not friendly to swapping components, I figured that the 80 gigs should be sufficient to install applications, with only a modest amount left over for local data. No problem, there's tons of storage space on the network. At this point I realized I had what is probably a stupid and unjustified twitch. I'm used to having all my personal, business and development data on the local hard drive of the machine I'm working on. Now, there's not really room for that, which means that I have to work over, (gasp!) the network. Even as I felt that reaction I knew it was silly. With a 100 mbit network, it's not exactly pokey. And yet, there's this odd anxiety about not having the data on the local box. Any of you ever encounter such foundless and nagging little insecurities about such things, or is it just my misspent youth coming back to haunt me? Also, for those of you with significant home network environments, I'd be interested in your strategies for organizing & managing data, servers, etc.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Also, for those of you with significant home network environments, I'd be interested in your strategies for organizing & managing data, servers, etc.
I run a 5 user SBS2k network at home and aside form a few quirks I have had over the years it has been a wonderful experience for me. I run the server on a single proc PIII 800 with 384 megs ram and it chugs along with the occasional alarm for low memory but is otherwise flawless. I am waiting for SBS2003R2 to come out (back out that is) so I can put a new P4 based system in place and actually use exchange as the email gateway (point my domain at the box) for once instead of using a hosted email provider. Pretty basic setup so far but it has been nice to use the server for storage of people home folders and other things like media files and such. I have 1 100gig HD set up just for all the MP3s that we all use and have juts pointed every ones media players at that as a store. Backup solutions have been a bit of a pain since when using SBS you need an SBS freindly backup solution. I was using Backup Exec until my tapedrive died and since then have just been using DVDs.
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
Also, for those of you with significant home network environments, I'd be interested in your strategies for organizing & managing data, servers, etc.
I run a 5 user SBS2k network at home and aside form a few quirks I have had over the years it has been a wonderful experience for me. I run the server on a single proc PIII 800 with 384 megs ram and it chugs along with the occasional alarm for low memory but is otherwise flawless. I am waiting for SBS2003R2 to come out (back out that is) so I can put a new P4 based system in place and actually use exchange as the email gateway (point my domain at the box) for once instead of using a hosted email provider. Pretty basic setup so far but it has been nice to use the server for storage of people home folders and other things like media files and such. I have 1 100gig HD set up just for all the MP3s that we all use and have juts pointed every ones media players at that as a store. Backup solutions have been a bit of a pain since when using SBS you need an SBS freindly backup solution. I was using Backup Exec until my tapedrive died and since then have just been using DVDs.
Pretty cool. When I bought the MS Action Pack I got SBS, but since I live by myself I couldn't see any benefits to setting up a domain. I just share all the drives, and remote desktop into a box if I need to be on it. Any cool stuff I could be enjoying with a domain that's not multi user related?
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
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Pretty cool. When I bought the MS Action Pack I got SBS, but since I live by myself I couldn't see any benefits to setting up a domain. I just share all the drives, and remote desktop into a box if I need to be on it. Any cool stuff I could be enjoying with a domain that's not multi user related?
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Any cool stuff I could be enjoying with a domain that's not multi user related?
I would have to say no at that one really. It is nice to be able to set access rights to various folks in the house, throttle bandwidth using ISA server when my kid gets out of hand :) and I played around with pushing updates to other users desktops for a while using group policy. I also set up controls when my kid uses too much drive space for his downloads :) Mostly I take advantage of it just to keep common calenders in the house, control access and learn about the system myself while I use it. Since SBS2003 includes share point and I want to play with that I am excited. If it was just ME in the house then I would not do it this way.
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I mentioned recently that I'd reinstalled my main dev box to move it from W2K to XP due to some projects I'm working on. My reward? The box that served faithfully and provided a stable and productive environment for development under W2K now runs slower than my grandmother's Pontiac. I've been at this for long enough to realize that new versions of Windows seldom offer anything more than a reason to buy a new computer. Well done, Microsoft / Intel / AMD. Your evil scheme is working perfectly. Having just bought a new laptop a month ago, I was less than excited about spending yet more money on computers. They were sexy when I was young. Now they're just appliances. Since I basically just needed more processing speed & memory, I snagged one of Dell's $350 dimensions. Of course, it was closer to $600 after I bumped it to 2 gigs of memory, but still a decent deal. This box only has room for one SATA hard drive, and the stock was 80 gigs. No problem, I thought. I'll just swap it out with one of the 300 gig drives from another machine. Then I popped the top. They have it buried such that it's extremely major surgery just to reach it. And what little I could see of it, I wasn't entirely sure that it was even a standard mounting scenario. These boxes are clearly meant to be purchased and run - not exactly a tweakable box. I put the lid back on and started installing it. In addition to a couple of laptops, my network now has 5 boxes with a fair amount of available hard disk space to go around. Given that the Dell is not friendly to swapping components, I figured that the 80 gigs should be sufficient to install applications, with only a modest amount left over for local data. No problem, there's tons of storage space on the network. At this point I realized I had what is probably a stupid and unjustified twitch. I'm used to having all my personal, business and development data on the local hard drive of the machine I'm working on. Now, there's not really room for that, which means that I have to work over, (gasp!) the network. Even as I felt that reaction I knew it was silly. With a 100 mbit network, it's not exactly pokey. And yet, there's this odd anxiety about not having the data on the local box. Any of you ever encounter such foundless and nagging little insecurities about such things, or is it just my misspent youth coming back to haunt me? Also, for those of you with significant home network environments, I'd be interested in your strategies for organizing & managing data, servers, etc.
> Also, for those of you with significant home network environments, I'd be interested in your strategies for organizing & managing data, servers, etc. I have a network of seven boxes at home; each of these is designed for a particular function. The basic stratagem for data is to keep it on at least two separate machines; for example, the financial data is replicated between the server and the desktop, music between the server, the desktop and the HTPC, and so on. With three exceptions (the HTPC, the desktop, and my wife's laptop) all of the machines are built out of "scrap" hardware I've accumulated with newish HDD's fitted. The server runs am IDE RAID-1 array and (very occasionally :sigh: ) I dump the contents to tape. Replication is performed using the Unison application, which is quite nice and works cross platform (one desktop still runs Windows, although she's due for upgrade to Linux next month). The Coda filing system looks interesting for data replication, and also appears to offer a Windows implementation; haven't done any serious investigation on it yet. Security-wise, the network is extremely weak; all accounts are local to each machine (although I strive to keep the passwords in sync), and the data is unencrypted. My game plan is to to encrypt the data partitions, and replicate the encrypted data; then, use a hardware token (read: USB key with certificate) for local decryption on whatever box I happen to be using. This will provide security against physical theft. There's a wireless network running WPA containing the HTPC and the laptop; router/firewall between this an the internet; then another firewall between the wireless segment and the server, which has another firewall onto the wired segment and routes between the two.
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> Also, for those of you with significant home network environments, I'd be interested in your strategies for organizing & managing data, servers, etc. I have a network of seven boxes at home; each of these is designed for a particular function. The basic stratagem for data is to keep it on at least two separate machines; for example, the financial data is replicated between the server and the desktop, music between the server, the desktop and the HTPC, and so on. With three exceptions (the HTPC, the desktop, and my wife's laptop) all of the machines are built out of "scrap" hardware I've accumulated with newish HDD's fitted. The server runs am IDE RAID-1 array and (very occasionally :sigh: ) I dump the contents to tape. Replication is performed using the Unison application, which is quite nice and works cross platform (one desktop still runs Windows, although she's due for upgrade to Linux next month). The Coda filing system looks interesting for data replication, and also appears to offer a Windows implementation; haven't done any serious investigation on it yet. Security-wise, the network is extremely weak; all accounts are local to each machine (although I strive to keep the passwords in sync), and the data is unencrypted. My game plan is to to encrypt the data partitions, and replicate the encrypted data; then, use a hardware token (read: USB key with certificate) for local decryption on whatever box I happen to be using. This will provide security against physical theft. There's a wireless network running WPA containing the HTPC and the laptop; router/firewall between this an the internet; then another firewall between the wireless segment and the server, which has another firewall onto the wired segment and routes between the two.
-- What's a signature?
Very cool. :cool: I have a batch file that runs overnight using the command line version of WinZip to archive my data to a collection of zip files from one box over to another box. Then I periodically burn that directory of zips to DVD. I went to this scheme years ago after I got tired of continually having to buy new tape drives to support ever greater amounts of data, not to mention the flakiness of many of the software packages they used. Also, my thinking is that now I can get to my data from anywhere, as Windows supports the zip format. Before, the only way I could retrieve the data was from that brand and model of tape drive. Coda sounds interesting. I'll have to give it a peek.
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com