The Big Giant Upgrade

(Warning: big giant geeky post ahead. Stop now if you're not interested in home networks and junk)

I've been on a bit of a geek diet over the last few years, not upgrading any of my personal IT equipment except where absolutely necessary. It got to the point where I was a bit down about my home IT setup - it did a bunch of stuff, but it wasn't too shiny. So, in the last year or so I've started improving stuff - getting new stuff throughout that I can actually enjoy and makes life better.

It started with a 24" LCD monitor for my main home computer, a linux box in the lounge room. Much nicer, and less likely to kill the kids when it falls on them than the previous 21" CRT monitor. Then I upgraded to ADSL 2+ and bought a new ADSL modem, which I ended up not successfully installing (it didn't like long ethernet, and the machine it connected to was in the lounge room, and the phone line in the kitchen). Plus, it turned out that my old modem could kind of handle ADSL 2 (5 megs connection speed vs. 7 megs on the new modem).

But recently we've ramped up the speed. To replace Ye Olde iMac in the kitchen (purchased december 2000) we bought Mac Mini and a cheapy 24" LCD monitor. This has turned out great - the kids love being able to watch the various kids movies we've ripped to the Mac, and using Front Row makes it really easy for them to control. Jen got herself a new MacBook on the cheap - it was a bargain, direct from Apple, and her work laptop is getting rather long in the tooth. Since I was heading to WWDC, I got an iPod Touch so I'd know what an iPhone was like. The other week I finally got sick of our crappy old wireless router (it had forgotten that networks should have a password, and it didn't with with the iPod Touch), so we bought a shiny new Airport Extreme router. We've now got working Wi-Fi, throughout the whole house! We also moved an external drive off the Kitchen Mac onto the Airport Extreme, to make it shareable even when the kitchen mac is sleeping.

So last night I decided to bit the bullet and reorganise everything. I was getting annoyed with the Linux box running Fedora Core 4 (I'd tried upgrading previously, but was stymied by some foul whining to do with disk labels in the fstab), since I couldn't run any new stuff on it - there aren't any decent remaining RPM sites for FC4, and I didn't really want to compile Firefox 3 from source on that old box. I started installing Fedora Core 9, and while I was doing that (waiting for disks to be fscked, etc) I re-arranged the entire house network to use the new network equipment properly.

The old layout was:

Old ADSL modem linked via 20 metre ethernet to linux box, which did NAT and shared the connection to the rest of the house. 2 hubs (100 meg and 10 meg) shared connected all the machines, the wireless devices, etc.

I've had roughly that layout for the last 10-15 years. Linux does a good job of NAT. But, so do modern ADSL routers, so the new layout is:

New ADSL router does NAT for entire internal network. Several devices connected to ADSL router, some to the airport, and some to the old 100 meg switch. Old 10 meg switch is gone. Linux box is now just another machine on the network.

Which is much cleaner, if a little alien (I've had a proper Linux machine NATing for so long that it feels weird and scary to trust a little white box to do the same job). I've still got to do some optimising. I might even have enough ports on the ADSL router and Airport to drop the 100 meg switch as well. It's all working nice and quickly.

Meanwhile, the poor old linux box is having a hard time with the upgrade. Didn't like the partition map on one drive; couldn't figure out the monitor (it's sticking to 800x600 for now), wouldn't let me log in (some dodgy old bonobo config needed purging, and most of my old gnome settings as well). Updating the thing is painful - there are a heap of old RPMs that aren't getting along with the new RPMs, so I'm doing the old RPM conflict dance. I had to give it up for the evening at about 2:30am last night, and I'll be back into it again tonight after all the guests are gone (big family dinner tonight). Hopefully I'll soon have a nice shiny new Fedora Core 9 box that still does all its old jobs properly - movie watching (piping to the TV), file serving, DAAP serving, etc.

But it feels good to have a more modern setup, even if there is a bunch of work involved. Still pondering getting an Apple TV (very nearly bought one in the US), maybe a Mac for the lounge room (moving the linux box into the Study for working and file serving on), hooking up the old kitchen mac in the library, and getting a decent machine for upstairs.