The home server closet

Sept. 30th 2011 was the day the microserver went live.  So for the last 2 years, our home network has been centered around this little HP Microserver N36L.  These are great little machines I must say – its been rock solid, no hardware issues, and has just sat in the closet chugging away with barely a break; the last time I rebooted the box it was showing uptime of around 7 months!

Home comms and server

Home comms and server

As you can see, it doesn’t sit alone in the cupboard.  Its powered via an APC SmartUPS 1000, which is secretly a SmartUPS 1500, after I replaced the batteries with ones from the 1500 thanks to a great write-up on good ol’ OCAU.

Alongside, sits the Tel$tra Bigpond cable modem – a Netgear CG3100 running in bridge mode, connected at 116/2 Mbps.  Routing is done by our old ADSL router, using a WAN ethernet port instead of the DSL – kind of a sucky solution, as its only capable of routing at 65Mbps so its hamstringing the connection, but it has a rock solid VOIP interface and manages switching POTS and VOIP calls fairly nicely, and lets face it, 65 megabits is plenty for home usage.

One cool thing – I got the cable guy to run the cable into the back of a closet when he came to install the modem.  If only the rest of the wiring was as neat!  Darn.. the more I write, the more I find “things I’d do differently”, but those will come up as this blog evolves.

You may notice there’s some typical home networking gear thats not in this cupboard.. thats because the main gigabit switch and wifi bridge are in the center of the house (the kitchen).. for now.

So I started out saying that the microserver is approaching its second birthday.  That was because I’ve lately been wanting to do more with the home server, and am finding the dual-core 1.3GHz cpu just too limiting, along with the maximum 8Gb of ECC memory installed in the box.  So upgradeitis is upon me, and I’m buying up bits for the new variant of the home server.

And now its confession time.. I cropped the picture above 🙂  Here’s what it really looks like.

server_cupboard_larger

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *