{"id":708,"date":"2008-05-02T01:22:51","date_gmt":"2008-05-02T05:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/05\/02\/the-dream-network\/"},"modified":"2008-05-02T01:22:51","modified_gmt":"2008-05-02T05:22:51","slug":"the-dream-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/05\/02\/the-dream-network\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dream Network"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Periodically I come across deals for computers that are <em>very<\/em> tempting. I&#8217;m not necessarily in the market right away: I&#8217;m going to keep my laptop until I&#8217;ve been working long enough that I can afford something stellar. It&#8217;s silly to &#8220;upgrade&#8221; a little bit. But every time I see these deals, I think of the various ways I could set things up&#8230; My &#8220;ideal (but realistic) computer&#8221; would actually be a network:<\/p>\n<ul>\n    <li>Network infrastructure: Gigabit Ethernet, switched, over Cat6. 10GigE and fiber are cool, but really not worth the cost for a home network.<\/li>\n    <li>A server machine. It needn&#8217;t be anything too powerful, and could (should) be something that doesn&#8217;t use a ton of electricity. The machine would run Linux and serve multiple rolls:\n<ul>\n    <li>Fileserver. It&#8217;d have a handful (4-6?) of 500GB disks, running RAID. While performance is important, it&#8217;s important to me that this thing be very &#8216;safe&#8217; and not lose data. (Actually, in a <em>very<\/em> ideal setup, there&#8217;d be two fileservers for maximum redundancy, but my goal with this setup is to be reasonable. What interests me, though, is that I think it&#8217;d be possible to use an uncommon but awesome network file system like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coda.cs.cmu.edu\/\">Coda<\/a> or AFS, but also have some network shares on top of that service that &#8216;look normal,&#8217; so Windows could just merrily connect to an M: drive or whatnot, merrily oblivious to the fact that the fileserver is actually a network of two machines.) It&#8217;s important that the machine have gobs of free space, so that I can merrily rip every CD and DVD I own, save every photo I take, and back up my computers, without every worrying about being almost out of disk space. It&#8217;s also important to be hyper-organized here, and have one &#8220;share&#8221; for music, one &#8220;share&#8221; for photos I&#8217;ve taken, etc.<\/li>\n    <li>Internet gateway. It&#8217;d act as my router\/firewall to the Internet, and also do stuff like DNS caching. It may or may not serve as a caching proxy; I tend to only notice caches when they act up, but then again, it might be quite helpful.<\/li>\n    <li>Timeserver. For about $100 you can get a good GPS with PPS (pulse-per-second) output and keep time down to a microsecond. Hook it up to the serial port of this machine, and have your local machine sync to that for unnecessarily accurate time. (Actually, it looks like you can do <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Precision_Time_Protocol\">PTP<\/a> in software with reasonable accuracy?)<\/li>\n    <li>Asterisk machine, potentially taking in an analog phone line and also VoIP services, and giving me a nice IP-based system to use, blending them all so it&#8217;s transparent how they&#8217;re coming in. It would also do stuff like voicemail, call routing\/forwarding, etc. For added fun, it could be made to do faxes: receive them and save them as a PDF, and act as a &#8220;printer&#8221; for outgoing faxes. The code&#8217;s there to do this already.<\/li>\n    <li>Printserver. If you have multiple machines, it&#8217;s best to hang your printer(s) off of an always-on server. It could speak CUPS or the like to Linux, and simultaneously share the printer for Windows hosts.<\/li>\n    <li>MythTV backend? But most likely not; I&#8217;d prefer to offload that to a more powerful machine, rather than bogging down a server.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n    <li>Primary desktop. Surprisingly, a quad-core system, 4 GB of RAM, and a 24&#8243; LCD can be had for around $1,000 these days. That&#8217;s all I need in a system. I have my <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Logitech_G15\">Logitech G15<\/a>, which is all the keyboard I need. My concern is with what to run&#8230; These days I make use of Windows and Linux pretty heavily. I think virtualization will be mature enough by the time I&#8217;m actually going for a setup like this to allow me to get a Linux-based Xen host and run Windows inside of a virtual machine with no performance degradation. (This is actually <em>mostly<\/em> possible already, but as Andrew will attest, Xen can still have some kinks&#8230;.) The system should have a big monitor. It&#8217;d be interesting to put something like an 8GB solid-state drive in it and use that for a super-fast boot, but the jury&#8217;s still out on whether it&#8217;s worthwhile. (I guess that some places are pushing SSD under some special name to make Windows boot instantly, but the reviews I&#8217;ve heard suggest that it gives a nominal improvement at best.)<\/li>\n    <li>Secondary desktop. Pay attention for a while to the short bursts of time when you <em>can&#8217;t<\/em> use your computer. The system locks up for a bit, or it&#8217;s just unbearably slow while the disks spin up and get a massive file, or you have to reboot, or you&#8217;re playing a full-screen game and die and wait 15 seconds to respawn, or&#8230;.. In this &#8220;ideal setup,&#8221; I&#8217;d have a second machine. It needn&#8217;t be anything special; in fact, it could be the cheapest machine possible. It&#8217;d basically run Firefox, AIM\/IRC, Picasa (off of the network fileserver), iTunes, and the like. For the sake of completeness, it should probably run whatever the other system doesn&#8217;t, out of Linux, XP, and Vista.<\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Periodically I come across deals for computers that are very tempting. I&#8217;m not necessarily in the market right away: I&#8217;m going to keep my laptop until I&#8217;ve been working long enough that I can afford something stellar. It&#8217;s silly to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/05\/02\/the-dream-network\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10,14,15,16,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-ideas","category-lists","category-living","category-materialism","category-rants-raves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}