Taking the home network a bit farther than most
By john on Aug 6, 2008 in AT&T, Apple, featured
It’s no surprise to many that my home network is more advanced than most. I’m a geek, it’s what we do. Over the past few weeks I’ve slowly been building out my home network – from it’s initial incarnation as a typical broadband home network with an airport extreme base station serving as my router and a DSL line for bandwidth. Then I added in-wall structured wiring for gigabit ethernet throughout the house, which was awesome. Then I added a 12U server cabinet in my garage ( the terminal point for the structured wiring, and location of my patch panel ) that houses 2 older Apple XServes, a UPS, a gigabit switch and 3 dell Poweredge 850 servers.
This past weekend, and over the past couple of days, I’ve changed the network topology quite a bit – setting up one of the XServes as a gateway device with NAT, DHCP, DNS, NFS, Open Directory (with Kerberos) and XGrid – the last one not currently being used, but I am contemplating a few uses. I then set up the second XServe to serve as a media server housing all of my digital media – music, movies, tv shows, etc. This server isn’t yet, but soon will be, linked to my AppleTV in my media center (via gigabit ethernet) to sync my movies and shows across.
I’ve got a few things left to accomplish to make everything run smoothly, but for the most part things are looking great and working well.
OS X Server 10.5.4 runs incredibly smooth and has been a joy to use (as opposed to my previous experiences with OS X Server which had issues, though I believe that to have been a corrupt installation or something.). I was able to get the gateway device setup pretty easily following instructions found in Apple’s X-Grid clustering and advanced computing guide (available on their site).
I’m still waiting for my iPhone 3G – I made the mistake of doing a direct fulfillment from AT&T (apple’s store here was out of stock and I was impatient). Unfortunately AT&T has been slower than an elderly woman with a broken hip when it comes to actually doing the fulfillment. It’s been two weeks and still no iPhone. Way to drop the ball AT&T.
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