I’m making a home network. You see. My family has some old computers that aren’t good for normal use, but they still work and are capable of being servers.
We’ve got this old tower from like 2000 if not earlier. Back in 2006 during my junior year of high school, my dad bought my sister and I two Gateway laptops. These laptops were supposed to last us throughout our college careers. My sister caused my laptop to be unusable because she broke the screen by yanking on it–she’s a great sister by the way. No really! Karma finally bit her in the ass; her laptop got infected this summer and she had to get a new one.
I’m back home from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I was an IT major. I’m gonna go to UTEP next semester. That means I have a semester off. I’m bored. There’s unused computers lying around. So yea, I’m making a home network.
Originally, I wasn’t going to do anything really productive with them. But, I’ve been working on my sisters infected laptop trying to rescue all her pictures. My family doesn’t really backup their data and I’m the one who has to pay for it. I decided to take the bull by the horns and just make a file server for everyone to back up to.
The Setup
The two laptops and tower will be the servers. I named my computers after philosophers. I’m a liberal arts person at heart forgive me.
Kierkegaard is the tower. Kierkegaard is a web and PXE server. Nietzsche is my old laptop. Nietzsche will be the file server and I’ll hook up my terabyte external hard-drive to it(him?). My sisters laptop will be Camus. I don’t really know what to do with that one yet.
Voltaire is my PSUbuntu. Voltaire will just play the files held by Nietzsche.
I’ve used my personal laptop to SSH into all these guys and install whatever needs to be installed. But, I do have this Dynex TV will lotsa connections in the back. I used it to see what was going on during Nietzsche’s install and I use it with the Voltaire.
Excuse the mess.
This has been a good experience so far. It feels nice to put my skills to good use. Plus, I’ve got a lot more networking and server experience. There’s more to come too. I’ll probably end up installing a DNS server on Camus.
What makes this ghetto?
Oh, I don’t know…
Is it the loose wires? Is it the cheap rack? Is it the fact that I’ve got all these computers in my messy room?
Its all of that. Plus, did you notice the clip on fan? Scroll back up and look more carefully.
Yea! Yea I’ve got a sweet cooling system. Cross Breeze 2.0!! Since I’m in El Paso, TX the air conditioner is almost always on. If I open up the window behind the rack and turn on the fan, I get a sweet cross breeze going.
So, there it is. My nascent ghetto home network.
Oh, and you may have noticed my record player. Voltaire and the Dynex are essentially my entertainment system. You know how most entertainment systems have nice speakers? Well, my record player has pretty nice speakers. =)
