In the basement we have last year's dell el-cheapo Pentium 4 system crammed with its original 160G drive as boot, swap, and application store, and three 320G drives in a raid 5 configuration as "house data" which it seems I'm the only one using. It's attached to an old hacked battery backup system insulating it from spikes and dips. There's a hub in the basement going to a wire on the outside of the house up to the attic where my office is, where the dsl router is. We have 802.11, but i won't run a server through wireless, so went through the grief of running cable.
Cables from this machine run up the wall through the intervening floor onto an old sewing table in the living room where the UI components sit, so we have a terminal with full-speed web in the common area with no fan/hard drive whine (very nice).
I run a nightly backup job from my work machine's key directories to the raid 5 array.
Interesting. The public terminal sounds like it might be useful, though in my house there tend to be two computer-users and two wireless laptops. But a spare thin-client could be pretty neat.
On cabling: as it turns out, our house is small enough that the room with the DSL modem is just one or zero closet-holes away from nearly anywhere we'd want cat5. Unfortunately, melted_snowball's laptop wifi doesn't seem to like the range of my base station, though my laptop is fine. We've put a second wifi upstairs (a mac airport) which is wired through the hole in the closet.
I suppose I should do some more tests of serving music to my laptop via wifi. That would be a real non-starter. I"m OK with copying video before watching it; but I want my audio to Just Work. Seems to me it should, at least for itunes. famous last words.
And yeah, I should also be backing up from my laptop to the fileserver; that was a design element I didn't mention, because I forgot about it. :)
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Cables from this machine run up the wall through the intervening floor onto an old sewing table in the living room where the UI components sit, so we have a terminal with full-speed web in the common area with no fan/hard drive whine (very nice).
I run a nightly backup job from my work machine's key directories to the raid 5 array.
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On cabling: as it turns out, our house is small enough that the room with the DSL modem is just one or zero closet-holes away from nearly anywhere we'd want cat5. Unfortunately, melted_snowball's laptop wifi doesn't seem to like the range of my base station, though my laptop is fine. We've put a second wifi upstairs (a mac airport) which is wired through the hole in the closet.
I suppose I should do some more tests of serving music to my laptop via wifi. That would be a real non-starter. I"m OK with copying video before watching it; but I want my audio to Just Work. Seems to me it should, at least for itunes. famous last words.
And yeah, I should also be backing up from my laptop to the fileserver; that was a design element I didn't mention, because I forgot about it. :)
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