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How Does Your Personal Data Center Measure Up? 266

Posted by Cliff from the si-per-ft^2 dept.
tachijuan asks: "My job allows me too meet many technically inclined people. Invariably we get to talking about our home setups. I've run across some very sophisticated setups. Some people I've met have enough computing and storage resources to have themselves classified as large data centers. They run this at home, and usually just for the hell of it. How do the setups of Slashdot readers measure up?" How many pieces of networked digital equipment do you have at home?
"Here's a description of mine:
  1. 1 x RedHat 9 quad processor PIII Xeon web server+other general duties stuff
  2. 1 x FC3 router/VPN server
  3. 1 x Astaro secure unix firewall/external router
  4. 1 x FC3 email ( http://zimbra.com/ ) server + backup server
  5. 1 x Mac G3 OSX 10.3.9 print server
  6. 1 x WinXP print server/general use machine
  7. 1 x WinXP general purpose home machine + TIVO media center server
  8. 1 x UltraSparc 10, Solaris 9, play machine + web server
  9. 2 x WinXP laptops
  10. 1 x Apple PowerBook 17"
  11. 1 x NetApp 630 with 1.1TB of disk serving both NFS and CIFS
  12. 2 x external USB 200GB drives for backups of main data in NetApp DCF
  13. 3 x inkjet printers scattered around the house
  14. 1 x 8 port GigE main DCF backbone switch
  15. 1 x 32 port Etherport III main home network switch
  16. 1 x WRT54G switch providing high speed network for interal home use
  17. 1 x befw11s4 switch + range extender for slow-speed, high range, general home use
  18. 1 x TIVO!
  19. 4 x spare machines laying around waiting to be purposed
By the standards of some of the people I've run accross, this is not much. To my non-techie friends, this seems either extravagant, puzzling, or both."
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How Does Your Personal Data Center Measure Up? More

How Does Your Personal Data Center Measure Up?

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  • Just a Fujitsu P1510... (Score:5, Funny)

    by GrpA ( 691294 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:42PM (#14764933)
    I don't have to compensate for shortcomings in other areas...

    • Re:Just a Fujitsu P1510... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:50PM (#14764965)
      This reminds me of an old joke:

      A tiger is walking through the jungle, and off in the distance he hears a cry for help. He runs over to find his friend the elephant stuck in the quicksand. "Help me! help me!", cries the elephant. So the tiger runs home, gets his Corvette, drives back to the elephant, throws him a rope, and pulls him out of the quicksand. "Thank you" says the elephant.

      Two weeks later, the elephant is walking through the jungle and hears a cry for help in the distance. Running over, he sees his friend the tiger stuck in the quicksand. "Help me! Help me!", cries the tiger. The elephant whips out his dick, throws it to the tiger, and uses it to pull him to safety.

      The moral of the story? If you have a big dick, you don't need a Corvette.

    • Re:Just a Fujitsu P1510... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Sentry21 ( 8183 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @02:05AM (#14765727) Journal
      People always love my powerbook when they first see it, but they invariably say something along the lines of 'It's so small!' Of course my reply is always, 'Yeah, I'm overcompensating for having a huge dick.'

      No dates so far, but it gets a lot of laughs. :p
    • ...since he has a DecSystem-10 mainframe at home. Not much on raw compute power, but big on cubage and power consumption (how many of us have a three-phase plug in our loungerooms?) and it does play StarTrek (on a DecWriter LA-36, if you please, but normally VT-220s).

      One of the many huge power-supply caps has enough juice to keep my laptop running for about fifteen minutes.

      My own home "network" consists of a do-everything Linux server (2.4GHz Duron, 2G RAM, 160GB IDE HDD, Mandriva 2006.0) which doubles as

    • You know, the funny thing is... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tgd ( 2822 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @07:49AM (#14766577)
      The funny thing is, if a guy was interviewing with me for an IT position and said he ran a setup at home like that, he'd be round-filed. What a massive waste of electricity and resources. The functions he has listed can be easily met with two or three machines and its either massive intarweb dick-waving or a real lack of understanding about how IT services can or should be deployed when it takes twelve.

      Example: I run my Linux fileserver, my Windows MCE 2005 system for my XBox 360s, another Windows system running some home automation package I can't remember, and my general "this is internet accessible for ssh" Linux system on one piece of hardware, a relatively energy efficient dual Pentium III system with a load of RAM running VMWare and a bunch of external firewire drives. One server, a gigabit switch, a 10/100 switch and my DLink router. Enough to meet everything he was doing, and my electric bill isn't $100/month from it.

      I may actually add "describe your home network setup" to my list of interview questions. I'd never thought of it, and it tells you a lot about people, it seems.
      • I think it comes from having extra machines. Note that the guy has four extra computers lying around waiting for a purpose. I have three or four unused machines in the basement. I hate to throw them away - so I might end up using them for some side project like setting up Asterisk or an extra development web server. Sure, I could combine a bunch of boxes to do all of these things on one, but then I'd let that Pentium II powerhouse go to waste.

        • then I'd let that Pentium II powerhouse go to waste.

          I laughed. :)

          Anyway, I think I've come up with a pretty decent manner to do these things. At any time, I only have three desktops and two laptops. Desktops: One acts as an SSH gateway/webserver with the "important" software, another is a play Linux box (for testing things out, general use, sits under my desk), and the third is the Windows machine for games (sits under my desk). These machines were made in chronological order; that is, the workhor

  • Power consumption? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Willie_the_Wimp ( 128267 ) * <fred@garvin.gmail@com> on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:46PM (#14764949)
    I started building a nice phat data/media center, plus PCs attached to the TV in living room, bedroom, etc... but my power bill is already crazy. If I start adding more and more 100% uptime systems, it will get ridiculous. I have pared down to just the essentials; what's the point of all that hardware in a house? "Just cause I can" doesn't pay the bills.

    Granted, I live in CA, so my power bill is pretty obscene to begin with, so maybe this isn't a concern for everyone.

    Fred.
    • Agreed. I reduced my hardware quite a bit and reduced my power consumption over the last year when my power bill started exceeding $100/month during the winter (with gas heat).

      That said, even in the reduced capacity, I'm running a Linux firewall, with a Mac OS X server and an MkLinux server in the DMZ, with a networked TiVo and an Airport Extreme base station on my internal network, and non-concinuously, I use two laptops on the wireless network, a quad G5 on the internal wired network, and a photo print

      • Wow, blast from the past seeing "MKLinux" and then looking to see the username attached to it. Sends me back 9 years or so....Glad to see you haven't given up the cause. I think last I saw you were working on a floppy driver for it maybe?

        Anyway, my geekfest is a PowerEdge running Mandrake 9.2* for postfix/mailman/apache for mailman; a newer PowerEdge running Netware 6.5/GroupWise 7.0 , and a poweredge running Server 2k3...which does absolutely nothing except burn electricity, all running on a gigabit Netg
    • Agreed. My 24/7 server is a Toshiba Tecra 8100 laptop (PIII/650, 512MB, 30GB, Combo) with a broken screen I got for a song on eBay. 13 watts standby and a built-in 3-hour UPS. I have a much larger server that stays switched off (though I'm considering setting it up for Wake-on-LAN so I can activate it remotely when needed.)

  • Next submission (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mortiss ( 812218 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:48PM (#14764954)
    I am sorry but this sort of subject just begs for another "ask slashdot" submission called: "What is your monthly electricity bill?" Now seriously, how much would setups like that add to your average power bills.
    • According to my electric bills, I'm using 9KWh per day. That seems to be the U.S. average [wisegeek.com]. I have five machines but only two that run continuously, the various assortments of wall warts and a 25-gallon fish tank (home of a 3-inch firemouth, 3-inch pictus catfish and six tiger barbs). As I rebuild my machines, I'm keeping an eye on reducing the energy consumption as much possible. Even though I'm an uber-geek, I find reading the electric bill to be very confusing.

      • Re:Next submission (Score:3, Informative)

        by jm92956n ( 758515 )
        According to the page you linked, the average cost per KWh is approximately 9 cents (and I, as a lucky New Yorker, pay almost 24 cents). The average consumption is much higher. According to this page [michaelbluejay.com], the average usage per year is 10,215 KWh per year, or roughly 28 per day .. thus, if you're using only 9 per day, you're significantly below the national average. According to my electric bill, I use 3 KWh per day.
      • Wow, you had me scared, I'm at about double that... but looking at that chart more closely, I think that's cents per kilowatt hour--they're giving cost per region, rather than usage per region.

        I'd be curious to see what that figure is, too, though.
    • Ha! I know it's late because I just read the parent to say,"How much is your mother's electric bill?"
    • My power bill a few months ago was around $175. Then I tweaked my computers for low consumpution and the next month it was $155. The problem was not the computers, but the electric heater. It wouldn't turn off, so was at least partially running all the time. I got it fixed and this month my power bill was around $105. During none winter months it has been $60-100 in the past.
      • The problem was not the computers, but the electric heater. It wouldn't turn off, so was at least partially running all the time

        That's what you get for putting your P4 Prescott's into Stand-By mode.

    • I have an AMD Athlon P2400 rig with 2 Gb ram, 1 40 Gb drive and 3 120 Gb drives in RAID5.

      In between 2004 and 2005 the thing had been continuously running about 250 days, and it added at the end of the year about 400 EUR extra to my electricity bill.

      Currently, I now start it and stop it when I want to use it.

      I need time to figure out if I can use some advanced power management on that system or if I need to move to a more recent motherboard with power saving features.

  • Let's hear it for DEC (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thomasdz ( 178114 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:55PM (#14764998)
    OK...I probably have one of the more antique home data centers...

    three VAX 4000-300 (all running OpenBSD, of course, it's my home firewall)
    two VAX 4000-200
    two VAX 4000-105 (running VMS)
    a VAX 4000 m60
    two VAX 3100
    three PDP 11/34as
    I've also got two DEC Rainbows, but I haven't powered them up in years.
    And of course, the usual collection of Commodore 64s, Radio Shack CoCos, Radio Shack MC-10s, etc. etc.

    And a Mac Mini in the kitchen

    Thomas

  • Uh, 1 P166MMX. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WoTG ( 610710 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:56PM (#14765001) Homepage Journal
    Really, how much gear does one need running at home? More importantly, how much power and space are you willing to use to do it? I've got an ancient P166MMX running downstairs for file/print/mail/and even web hosting for my personal website (not the one in the sig). About a year ago, it was a sad old P90 that finally had a seizure of some sort. The only thing I would consider changing right now is a bit more hard drive space... and maybe RAID. (Yes, I do regular backups).

    Oh, that excludes workstations, routers, and hubs of course. Two desktops and a laptop - none of them is particularly high-end either.

  • holy overkill, batman! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Clover_Kicker ( 20761 ) <clover_kicker@yahoo.com> on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:57PM (#14765005)
    > quad processor PIII Xeon web server+other general duties stuff

    My file/mail/web/backup server is a Pentium 233 MMX. It's ridiculously overpowered for what it does.

    load averages: 0.10, 0.09, 0.08

  • I'm just starting. (Score:3)

    by SocialEngineer ( 673690 ) <invertedpanda@@@gmail...com> on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:58PM (#14765011) Homepage

    I just got my first job out of college (working for the oldest newspaper in Missouri as a graphic artist), so after a raise or two, I should be able to afford more than ramen noodles and college loan payments :) So far I've got an old Thinkpad serving as an SSH/Proxy server (Slack 10.2 - I use it to set up an encrypted connection while on wireless hotspots - see my guide at Security Engine for secure surfing using SSH), a couple routers, a multiboot desktop (Win XP/Slackware 10.2, later changing the Slack install to OpenBSD), and a "newer" (still old - 1ghz p3) Thinkpad laptop running Windows 2000 and Slackware 10.2, which goes with me whenever I'm doing work outside the house.

    I've noticed Dell servers getting cheaper - first plan is to pick up one or two of them, since they offer Linux compatible hardware configs.

    My tech fetish is storage. I had a terrabyte of storage until one of my drives went kaput, so now I'm back down to 780gb IIRC. I'm a solo recording artist/sound engineer, so I have a lot of raw audio files. I plan to build that up to a few TB, now that drives keep getting cheaper. Once I get a couple decent servers, I'm going to start generating my own rainbow tables.

  • And Americans wonder why the world hates us... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Run 30 machines at home to do our bidding when (and this is still overkill) a few could do the same amount of work. Who cares if you are only home (and awake) for a few hours a day. Remember these days fondly when energy prices are sky high.

    1xWRT54gs with OpenWRT (wireless/firewall/router/vpn endpoint/whatever else)
    1x1.7TB RAID server whose disks spin down entirely when not in use (largest power draw)
    1xThinkpad X40 (laptops don't draw much)
    1xMac Mini (everything else, and the mini also draws almost nothin
    • 1 SMC "Barricade G", 1 Athlon XP 2200 with 2x80GB and 1x250GB drives (JBOD, but If I could afford 3 250's, it'd be raid-5) turned off when I'm not using it, 1 iBook, 1 film scanner, 1 flatbed scanner, 1 Monitor with 2 inputs, USB keyboard & trackball, USB switch.
  • I don't understand why someone would need this much computer equipment. It's like the guy with the Armani suit and Rolex watch driving a Lamborghini - he's compensating for something. Well, at least the Lamborghini guy probably gets some play... But then again, my own philosophy on life is to live within my means with as few material possessions as i can possibly get away with because inevitably i'll be moving, and i hate moving things.

    Anyways, here's the networked equipment I have in my 380 square feet of
  • I use to have an apartment filled with computers (I had a bit of a Sun fetish) and one day I just got fed up with the clutter so I decided to simplify my life. Now all I have is an Apple iBook and a Linksys WRT54GS and you know, I get a lot more done and I'm way happier.
  • Do you really need a dedicated machine for a print server? You're a packrat my friend. There is help [creativehomemaking.com] out there for you.

    To answer your question, I have a router -> desktop and laptop
  • What is the point of this discussion other than to show off?

  • Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 2.6T 814G 1.8T 32% /


    And:

    50 inch Panasonic Plasma.
  • It's not much, but it's sure worth it. I'm always very caring towards eectric bills and consumption:

    {Names of the peripheral on the network}
    Description
    [Indicates where it is connected to]

    1) {MODEM} DSL Router SpeadStream 5000 series (Unsure of exact number, normal residential 200KBps) [hooked up to the "router"'s eth0]
    2) {ROUTER} 200MHz Pentium 1 MMX, 2GB HDD and 48MB RAM running a Linux router distribution. Doubles as a webserver. (Yes, it's ipcop)
    3) {SWITCH1} 5 port 100mbit modded* D-Link switch [hooked t
  • With VMWare offering the Server product for free (after competition from Microsoft), I am all for consolidation of hardware. My plan is to get a dual quad-core processor (when they come out in a year or two) machine with 4 Gig of RAM and run the virtual server on it to run all the OS's I run on the multiple machines. Saving of space and power....

    and here: http://www.vmware.com/products/server/ [vmware.com] (it is in Beta but works great and release version will be free as well)
  • I have what I consider a fairly modest home network, with any of the following online over the course of a typical week:
    • a couple Mandriva Linux servers (dns, mta, imap, http, nfs, smb) mutually redundant
    • generic Mandriva Linux workstation for daily e-mail/web client activities
    • Mac G3 All-In-One next to the Mandriva workstation, for internet stuff that doesn't work easily on Linux.
    • PowerMac G5 in the studio for graphics/illustration work, iTunes, DVD-watching
    • iBook G3 with Airport for casual web surfing or

  • My job isn't like that, unfortunately (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20, 2006 @11:30PM (#14765144)
    I wish I had that kind of time!

    I'm a fashion model photographer, so most of my time is spent away from computers (I use an assistant to work out the photoshopping). I do know that at the rate that my hard disks are filling up that I could definitely use a data center upgrade. But I just don't have the time to fiddle with that.

    Here's a description of what I am busy doing:

    1 Fucking supermodels
    2 Snorting coke with supermodels
    3 Going to clubs with supermodels
    4 Fucking supermodels
    5 Attending runway events
    6 Pillow fights with supermodels (group)
    7 Attending gala openings
    8 Attending White House dinners (not so much these days, though)
    9 Travelling to exotic locales (this takes a surprising amount of time)
    10 Fucking supermodels
    11 Evaluating photo equipment
    12 Eating whip cream off the naked bodies of supermodels
    13 Photographing other supermodels performing #12
    14 Deep sea fishing
    15 Scuba diving
    16 Racing sports cars (hobby)
    17 Attending meet & greets with heads of state

    That's not quite 19 like you've got, but it keeps my busy. Too busy to do what I really love: Setting up home networks and fiddling with the audio drivers in Linux.
    • Have you ever considered you might be on the wrong site?

      Much as I can't be bothered to play the "my data centre's bigger than yours" game, I'm not going to mock those that want to. Most people come here (I assume) to discuss geeky stuff, and you must be pretty desperate to prove your superiority if you think that taking the mickey out of the /. crowd for doing that is big/clever.
  • Sheesh - and now everyone on Slashdot has a nice shopping list of components - with a little hard work, a location to shop....

    LOL....

    Keeping my list of equip private...
  • To back everything up just issue a single command: cp -R ~ /dev/null
  • I used to have an elaborate home network but found that it interfered with having a life, so I've been consolidating. I'm down to the following:

    1 Windows Laptop
    1 Linux Laptop
    1 dual core x1 CPU Linux workstation
    1 Samsung CLP-550 color laser printer
    1 HP Jetdirect print server
    1 8 port GB switch
    1 Cisco PIX501 firewall
    1 Wireless Access Point

    The workstation, Cisco and switch (and calbemodem) are the only things that are left on 24x7. The workstation is pretty heavily optimized to minimize power consumption so the
  • 1. Bay Networks 350-24T 100MB Managed Layer 2 Network Switch
    2. Netgear WGR614 (I think) - using for wireless G only.
    3. Sipura box - broadvoice phone access
    4. APC Smart 900 UPS w/2 battery modules (3+ hour runtime)

    Now, here's the servers:

    5. Custom Built AMD K6-2 450 firewall, Fedora Core 4
    6. Custom Built AMD Athlon 900, file server Fedora Core 4

    And end nodes:

    Computer Room:
    7. My main gaming rig, XP2800+6600GT+Santa Cruz, 1 19" crt and 1 15" lcd.
    8. Wife's rig, XP2100+5700LE+Riviera, 1 19" crt.
    9. Side
    • 400 Mhz PIII I was given for free (along with 512 MB memory and motherboard!)
    • No-name crappy heavy case
    • 4 GB SCSI disk I bought used for $20
    • Video card I bought out of the "africa doesn't want 'em" pile for $7 ("Will this card work with X?" "Maybe")
    • Flaky-ass 15" CRT (god I hate this thing; nothing has straight edges on my monitor...)
    • Happy-hacking Lite2 keyboard -- ahhh the good stuff!
    • No self respect

  • It's not the size of your personal data centre, but how you use it. At least thats what I heard anyway.

    Really, who needs a personal data centre when I have a shiny red sports car? :)
  • Lets see where to begin...

    Network Gear:
    Linksys WRT54G Hardware Ver 2 Wireless 802.11g
    Linksys SRW2016 16 Port GigE 10/100/1000 + 2 mGBic Port Managed Switch (network backbone)
    Netgear ProSafe JFS524F 10/100Mbps Switch + 1 100FX Slot
    Linksys WET54G 54Mbps Wireless Ethernet Bridge

    UPS Units:
    2x APC Back-UPS XS 1500VA UPS's

    Computer Infrastructure:
    Sun UltraSparc60 w/ 2x 450 Sparc 2i CPU's, 2 GB RAM, 2x 10GB 10k RPM SCSI (Webserver, Database Server)
    Intel P4C 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, 1.5 TB disk space (Fileserver)
    A

  • Queerest Ask Slashdot. Evar. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @11:55PM (#14765277)
    This is the equivalent of either a dick-size or old-school engine displacement war. Its nothing than more Slashdot navel-gazing, about how über we all are, vs. the unwashed masses, with a subtle MS bash thrown in.

    Instead of a "what trinkets do you have?" Ask Slashdot, how about a "Whats needed in a home lab?" Ask Slashdot question? Otherwise it degenerates into a wallet-size competition, or an obscure "my firmware version on my Linksys is better than yours because Fry's is teh suck, CompUSA is teh r0XX0r!" discussion.

    Next questions from the content-with-no-value dept.: "What do you drive?" Or "What did you have for breakfast?"

    • Just great... (Score:3, Funny)

      by tgd ( 2822 )
      Crap, now I feel like a total loser. Not only do I only have one computer in my home data center and only one client, my car is a tiny little 2000lbs and only 2 liter.

      I suck.
  • I'm lucky to have a room seperated from the house that contains most of my equipment. Powerbill is managable with proper power management but can get nasty during the summer here in FL.

    Servers (In older white/beige HP rack)
    - (1) No name 4U case running P4 1.6 w/1GB RAM and 2x80gb (web/mail/ftp - basic stuff, slackware 9)
    - (1) Compaq Proliant DL360 G4 (2x3.6GHZ Xeon, 4GB RAM 2x146gb local and 7x146gb via storageworks drive array all ultra320 scsi) running Windows 2003 Server, this runs a couple of virtua

  • less can be more (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LodCrappo ( 705968 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @12:07AM (#14765322)
    I used to have a house full of PCs doing various things that really didn't need to be done. It's a hobby, its fun. A few years ago I decided to take a different path. Instead of spending time finding out how many things I could get connected to my network, I tried to get rid of as much as possible without losing any functionality. The results have pleased the gf as well as reducing my power bill by $50+/month.

    Start with the firewall.. I had a Dell server running linux and iptables, freeswan, traffic shaping etc. It rarely even broke a sweat as a firewall, although I really liked having a linux shell on my edge router for testing purposes.. nothing beats tcpdump for figuring out whats going on, and you can't get that type of functionality from even a fancy hardware firewall.

    Or can you? Enter the linksys WRT54G. It's a tiny little box with no moving parts. It essentially has 5 nics which can be grouped into switches. It has a 802.11g interface and allows easy connection of big antennas. But most importantly, it runs linux. It runs linux, iptables, tc etc very well, and all the diagnostic tools I wanted to have are still available. This thing has easily paid for itself in power saved.

    Next stop, the file server. We all need a box that runs 24/7 and stores massive amounts of files (read pr0n). Once again, I was able to replace a full server with a tiny box. This one is called the linksys NSLU2... a tiny box with two usb ports and a nic. It runs linux, actually it runs Debian which is incredible and kind of blows my mind. But anyways, now all my files are served up by this little thing. It also runs postfix and does some network monitoring for me. Another great feature is that since the drives are all USB, I can turn off the ones that have things I don't need all the time on them. When I need something off them, just turn the drive on and a few seconds later its available.

    Third and final optimization was my combination of both a linux and a windows desktop. Todays PCs are really fast, kind of ridiculously fast if you arent playing the latest shoot em up. VMware is free now, and I have found that as long as you have plenty of ram, running linux on win or win on linux are both very usable. So two desktop machines have become one with an extra GB ram. Even better, I can fire up an extra windows box if I want to test something that I don't trust on my real machine (experimenting with WMF's and such) or an extra linux box to try out a new distro etc...

    So I've gone from 4 PCs that ran 24/7 to one (and of course a laptop, and a hx4700 ppc, etc etc The small toys don't count ;). I originally thought that these little devices would be unreliable, after all they are pretty cheap. But, both currently have uptimes over 100 days. I even kept the firewall/wireless ap running during a hurricane here last year, they run forever on a ups that wouldn't keep a PC running 15 minutes. It's suprising how quiet the office has become. Over time you don't notice the noise that several PCs can make, but it's significant. I can watch TV in there and hear it without disturbing anyone late at night. The room used to be significantly hotter than all the other rooms in my house, now it's not noticable. I've reclaimed a huge amount of space in my office. Sure, visitors might not immediately realize that I am a total geek, but sometimes that's ok.

    PS I don't mean to be advertising Linksys stuff.. you can get similar devices that run the same firmwares and linux distros from other vendors. Check out http://www.openwrt.org/ [openwrt.org] and http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ [nslu2-linux.org] for more info.

  • I'm pretty frugal with my finances.

    I have the following in front of me on my desk:
    * Dell Dimension 2400 - 2.4ghz Celeron, 512mb, 80gb. Running CentOS 4.2. My primary desktop.
    * IBM NetVista A30p - 1.8ghz Celeron, 512mb, 40gb. Running Ubuntu Dapper Flight 4. Yesterday ran Arch Linux 0.7.1. The day before it ran Gentoo 2005.1, for several weeks. It's my play system.
    * eMachine eTower 500ix - 500mhz Celeron, 256mb, 80gb. Running XP Pro. My old desktop. I've never seen any other eMachine last so long.
    * Two monito
    • Up until this previous December, I had as my only computer an Emachines 500i. It had its original 10gb drive and (put on your jealousy hate) a full 128mb of RAM. I replaced it with another Emachine that I bought for next to nothing. I always ran stripped down Linux distros on it and the speed of it surprised everyone who used it. It still works fine, I just don't turn it on anymore.
  • When my wife and I built our house, I got the green light to geek it out. I installed 48 ethernet ports into a 50 port managed switch sitting in a rack full of 4U cases with full UPS coverage for all. I had 3 or 4 desktops at a time and computers abounded throughout the house. Now we are selling the house and moving so we have to strip everything bare, just the essentials left in the house (we still have to live here while we try to sell). All the desktops are gone, the rack is gone, the switch is still in

  • Coming next week on Ask Slashdot... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @12:17AM (#14765364) Homepage Journal
    How long is your penis?

    • How does your personal pleasure center measure up?
      My job allows me too meet many well endowed people. Invariably we get to talking about our wangs. I've run across some very sophisticated tadgers. Some people I've met have enough to have themselves classified as "hung like a fucking horse". They run this at home, and usually just for the hell of it. How do the stiffys of Slashdot readers measure up?" How long is your member?
      "Here's a description of mine:"

      Okay, CUT!

  • As I live in a rural location, until recently I had a $1500/mo. Level 3 T1, but I've since outsourced my public facing servers to rented boxes at ServerBeach. Now its just consumer grade IP for me (which sucks if you have to upload anything).

    When I had the addition put on the house, the walls were opened up enough so I ran 5000 feet of cat5e. Now every room has at least one network drop box, which has 4 cat5e RJ45 ports and 2 RJ11. The master bedroom and living room have two of these and my office has 4.
  • My faithful dual monitor dual 1 ghz PIII box died this summer. Its untimely death lead to the purchase of 2 iMacs G5's both with external monitors and screen-spanning hack (1 gb of RAM in the GF's and 1.5 in mine. There's a cheesy DSL modem/firewall/access point (belongs to GF) connected to 2 8-port gigabit switches. The living room has a Mac Mini connected to the GF's television. There's an EyeTV on my iMac and a half-terabyte raid array for PVR storage. I can get to the PVR content from all the PC's u

  • I have a meagre setup in comparison but it serves me well enough. I'm a student so I don't have a lot of disposable income to spend on toys. I've also been threatened with death if I bring home another computer without getting rid of one. Since it's not my house, I comply.

    • 1 x OpenBSD DHCP / DNS / Web Server
    • 1 x FreeBSD Secure Web / Subversion Server
    • 1 x Windows Server 2003 Domain Controller so I can learn about Active Directory
    • 1 x General Purpose Windows XP Desktop w. TV Tuner
    • 1 x General Purpose Window

  • I see your Schwartz is as big as mine. (Score:3, Funny)

    by cutecub ( 136606 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @12:23AM (#14765389)
    ... Lets see how you handle it.

    -S
  • after hacking cliff's datacenter, it is now mine. plus he pays my electricity bills on it. not sure why i need two print servers at home though.
  • Not a data-center per se, but it generally does what I want it to.

    My most interesting machine is an Opteron 142 with 2gig of ram and a smidge less than 5tb of disk. This machine's job is to export its disks over a dedicated dual gigabit link to the front-end server - the idea being that when I want more space, I can add another machine full of drives and just mount 'em up on the front-end. The front-end server is an Athlon 64 with 1gig of ram and mirrored 300gb disks. Local storage on the front-end is us
  • Normally powered on:

    1 Quad Xeon P3, Debian Linux, Sendmail server
    1 Dual P3, Debian Linux, Web server
    1 Athlon, Debian Linux, DNS and misc. server
    1 Celeron, Debian Linux -- sentimental reasons, its in a custom wood-grain AT tower case and nothing later will fit in an AT case.
    2 Single P3s, Debian Linux, firewall/routers for my two broadband links (1 Cox Business Cable @ 5mbps + 17 IPs, 1 Verizon Residential Fios @ 15 mbps). I used to do it with a single machine but Linux 2.4's policy-based routing gets some of

  • Here's all I brought with me when I moved to California a year ago:

    • Pentium Pro 180 with Fedora Core 3. It was my everything server, but it's been off since moving.
    • Athlon 1GHz, with Fedora Core 3 and Windows XP. Was a desktop, now it's the everything server.
    • 17" PowerBook 1GHz (personal laptop).
    • 15" PowerBook 1.67GHz (work laptop).
    • Dell Axim X30 (PDA). Don't really use it.

    You don't need so many servers for home! I can only think of a few reasons you need many servers at once:

    • You want to learn about
  • Why have multiple machines when you can hook two keyboards and two monitors to one reasonable machine and have them in different rooms? OK so I have a little 800MHz embedded VIA thing (smaller than mini-itx) for hot weather, a low power consumption bittorrent box and as portable network storage. OK - so I also have a win2k machine that I put together one night from spare parts lying around the house to install one program - but that doesn't count because the motherboard PS/2 connections are dead. OK - so
  • Four identical Athlon64/3000s, 1GB RAM, Gigabyte K8VM800 motherboards, 4x7k250s, 3x7k400s, 1xSP1614 PATA, 3Ware 8506-4LP, Intel Gbit NICs. These machines run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Someday I will get motivated enough to upgrade them to some other form of Linux.

    Game Machine: Athlon64X2/4400. 3GB RAM. Soltek motherboard. PCIe X850 Pro. X-Mystique. 2x7k400s, 2 7k250s (SATA), 300GB Maxline, 2 SP1614Ns, 7k400 (all PATA). LiteOn DVD Burner. LiteOn 32x CD Burner (both on "SCSI Buddies" connected to an Adaptec 2
  • Well,

            Dell P4 1.4, Debian $200
            internal PCI FPGA $100

            Understanding what a turing machine is, priceless
  • 1 SDSL modem with 1.1/1.1 and 5 static ip addresses
    1 Cable modem with 3/256 and 3 dynamic ip addresses
    2 Netgear 5port 10/100 switches, one for cable and one for dsl
    1 Dlink gigabit switch, for lan
    1 Dlink wireless g router

    1 web/mail/etc server running FC4 on Athlon 64 3500+, 1gb, 3x250gb WD SATA RAID5
    1 desktop running FC development(at the moment) on Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2gb, 4x250 Seagate SATA RAID5
    1 mythtv box running FC4 on P4 2ghz, 512mb, 80gb Maxtor PATA, 2xPVR150
    1 test box(currently for playing with Xen)
  • Dell Dimension 4100 1.1 GHz P3 512 MB 160 GB HDD slot-loading DVD player and red ATARI sticker running Windows Server 2003 - file/ ftp server, remote desktoping, jukebox, backup storage, plaything

    Dell Latitude D600 1.3 GHz P-M 512 MB 40 GB HDD running Windows XP Pro - general purpose computer

    IBM Thinkpad X40 1.2 GHz P-M 512 MB 40 GB HDD running Windows XP Pro - work-supplied computer

    D-Link 4 port wireless-G router

    Roommate runs his Gateway desktop and Compaq laptop on network, too.

    I haven't sp
  • 2 X Sgi o2 running IRIX
    1 X Sgi Octane2 running IRIX
    2 X HP PA-RISC machines running Debian
    1 X Sun Ultra 20 running OpenBSD
    1 X Compaq proliant (8 way SMP Xeon) running Debian
    1 X Sun clone (4 way SMP UltraSPARCII) running Solaris
    3 X x86 laptops used by various family members
    3 X 10/100 hubs
    1 X 10/100 switch
    1 X D-link wifi access point
    1 X Asus WL-HDD running Asus GNU/Linux
    1 X Zipit running openzipit GNU/Linux
    1 X KVM switch

    And yes, this is set up in my parent's basement!
  • Desktop: Athlon 64 @ 3200+ / X800XT / 2gb ram / 620GB HD Space (2x250 gb media drives, 120gb system drive)

    Laptop: 1.8 ghz Celeron / 1gb ram / 80gb HD / Mobile Radeon 9700 (128mb)

    Backup drive for media: 500 gb Lacie external disk

    Video editing disk: 300 gb Maxtor one-touch

    Home theater is a 50in. Hitachi LCD projection TV with a Onyko sound system. A modded Xbox is set up to work with the video on my desktop, plus I have a Xbox 360 and a HD DVR box.

    All this is powered by a Linksys wireless router wit

  • I'm bored, it's late, what the heck....

    Our DSL is 3 meg down, 800k up, with eight static IPs and reverse DNS control. That plugs into a Cisco 720 DSL modem with 32 megs of ram, which runs the latest IOS. This modem handles DHCP (which I'm going to disable in favour of setting up a network management server) and also manages an IPv6 tunnel (also with reverse DNS control).

    From there, it goes to our Cisco Micro Switch 10/100 (old kit I guess), which routes it off to the various machines. The first is my roomma
  • Think about how much juice these things suck when you leave them on 24x7... Then tell the wife. Then see your uptime plummet.
  • 1x Motorola DOCSIS modem.
    1x Asus WL-500G Deluxe access point running OpenWRT. This one provides me with WiFi, NAT, firewall, FTP (vsftpd) and WWW (lighttpd). Here it is: http://dimss.homeunix.org/010about.html [homeunix.org]
    1x HP nx9020 laptop. Turned off most of the time.
    1x Sagem myX5-2 cellphone.

    Someday I will move to a large house. There will be real 19-inch box somewhere in basement.
  • here now.

    I want to say right off the bat, I've had several girlfriends in the past and am working on a first kid with my beautiful wife. In other words, I've matriculated from the heady days of proving my virility. I'm not in the slightest worried about how large my reproductive organs are perceived.

    This is not to say that I disparage the urge to crow about such things. I feel that it is a fundamental part of reproductive behavior. Nothing to be ashamed about. You got to advertise and strut your stuff if yo

  • oh great... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by maxpublic ( 450413 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @07:34AM (#14766528) Homepage
    ...a geek dick-measuring contest. Guys, it should've dawned on you by now that constructing elaborate home networks to compensate for a small penis size WILL NOT get you chicks. The jocks had it right from the start; spend all that money on a nice car and a few tailored suits, and you're far, far more likely to get laid by something other than a RealDoll, tiny penis or no.

    But seriously, I'd be much more interested to see what people had on their computers, and how much of that stuff they had. As in, "just how many gigs of porn do you have?" or "what the fuck is up with you torrenting all those Gilligan's Island episodes?"

    Me, I collect photos off the internet and turn them into wallpapers, which I run by category on eight separate desktops via the KDE pager. The collection, although not Guiness World Record making by any stretch, now stands at well over 10 gigs of high-quality or ultra-high quality photos, with about 40% of those photos having been converted into wallpapers (more than 10,000 cycling between the eight desktops). I know, a pretty fucking boring hobby, but one I enjoy and I've never run into anyone with a larger personal collection (obsession).

    This is the kind of thing I'd find of interest. I'd "Ask Slashdot" but I've pissed off the monkeys, er, editors one too many times and couldn't get a fucking presidential assassination link greenlighted at this point.

    Max
  • For details, look here [logicprobe.org].

    In the rack:
    - Cable modem
    - Cisco 4500M+ router
    - 1U Netfinity 4000R (650MHz P3) firewall, FreeBSD 6
    - Intel NetStructure 470F switch (8 x 1000Base-SX)
    - BayStack 450-24T switch (24 x 100Base-TX, 1 x 1000Base-SX)
    - Sun Netra T1 105 (360MHz US2i) auth/util server, Solaris 10
    - Sun Blade 1000 (2x900MHz US3) e-mail/SunRay/etc. server, Sol 10
    - Custom-built 4U PC box (2x600MHz P3) file server, FreeBSD 6
    - 3 x APC Smart-UPS (2200, 1400, 700)
    - Lightwave ConsoleServer 800 (serial console server)
    - So

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