The new website is now available at www.madchaz.com/blog. It is still a work in progress, but I do not plan to re-update this page with information.

I have done a very interesting re-organisation of my entire home network in the last few weeks. For starters, I finally got myself a new desktop computer.

My new computer is a marked improvement on the old one. My old computer as now become part of my architecture, replacing the old pentium 4 I was using as a SAN, as well as taking over some of the functions served by sonofboo. In keeping with the theme, the new system is called Capsule

Capsule hardware
CPU: 3700+ AMD64
RAM: 3G
Connectivity: 1G ethernet
Storage
1X250G SATA1
1X300G SATA2
2X2T SATA3

Comments I am actually surprised the board took the 2T drives this easilly. I am not very surprised that it only sees them as SATA2, however. As they will be accessed over 1G ethernet anyway, it doesn't change anything. The performance on it is very nice. Disk I/O bandwidth is much higher then anything the IDE drives could give. I can actually pretty much use my full ethernet connection and the machine is still bored. SAN and NAS performances are comparable.

Roles

Right now, I have it working as a SAN and a NAS.
The NAS is used for my home folder as well as sharing files between desktops and for my netbook.
The SAN is used for backup of the Windows 7 systems. As windows 7 home doesn't allow for backups on a network drive, but does on iSCSI, I am using this to perform backups directly on the server.
I am currently waiting a bugfix to get vmware-server2 working on it. I have some ideas I want to test out. I had contemplated installing a GUI in it, but for now I decided against doing so.

Sonofboo Hardware HP E-800
CPU:2XP3@800Mhz
RAM: 1.1G
Storage
50G Software raid5 array, on 4 SCSI drives.
No san allocated for now.

Comments
Sonofboo is still there, but it as been made a bit less busy. It doesn't work as a fileserver anymore. I also turned off kami on it, so it doesn't work as a router anymore either. Right now, for all intents and purpoces, it only gets usage as a web server and a database server. Dende still runs on it to host the website and the database still runs on the base OS, but that is about it.

I intend to either get rid of this system or change how I use it in the future. While it worked wonderfully for what I was using it before, the fact that I will rely less on virtual machines in the future makes it not quite as useful.

Dragonradar
CPU: AR9130@400MHZ
RAM: 32M
PORTS: 4LAN, 1WAN, 1 WLAN
Storage: 4M onboard flash
Comments
This is my new router. It is a dedicated linux box in a tiny form factor. (A switch with linux on it, basically) It as a lot of nice features I didn't have with the old linux virtual machine. It serves as a wireless bridge and my home firewall/nat for the internet. Performance is awesome, with the added bonus of taking advantage of the switch's capabilities. The better inter-connect means that even if I am maxing out the network doing backup from a system, the internet still works fine for the rest of the network. (This was an issue with my previous setup)

Cost breakdow for the upgrade
Capsule: Donated hardware from my previous desktop. 150$ for the two 2T drives.
Dragonradar: 30$ used, from a co-worker.

Additional comments: Overall, I am very happy with my new setup. The nice thing is that now, the fact that I have a 1G switch is actually making a very big difference. This also confirmed that my earlier bottleneck was the PCI bus on both sonofboo and kidboo, my old san. The new bottleneck is now the same one I had back in b's time, the network. Still 10 times faster then it was.

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