Pure Geekery
Here you’ll find a lot of obscenely technical details about various geeky aspects of my life, for anyone who likes to geek out over such things. Appropriately, we’ll start with this:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/IT/M/O d s:+ a-- C++++ UL++++ P+++ L+++ E+++ W+++ N++ K w--- O- M- V-- PS++ PE- Y+ PGP++ t+ 5+++ X- R++ tv b++ D- G++ e++ h- r+++ z+++**
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Computers
Here are the core specs for all of my computers. Enjoy!
Hostname: navi
Purpose: my primary workstation / desktop
OS: fedora 10
CPU: AMD Sempron 2800+
RAM: 1 GiB DDR 400
Board: MSI KT4Ultra (VIA K8T800 northbridge / VT8237 southbridge)
Graphics: Nvidia 6600GT (AGP)
Drives: 1x 160 GiB Sata, 1x 80 GiB IDE
Monitor: 14″ matte lcd (1.33 aspect ratio)
Hostname: neera
Purpose: my wife’s primary workstation / desktop
OS: fedora 10 / Windows XP
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
RAM: 2 GiB DDR2 800
Board: MSI K9VGM-V (VIA K8T890 northbridge / VT8237R+ southbridge)
Graphics: Nvidia 8600gt (PCI-e)
Drives: 2x 80 GiB IDE
Monitor: 22″ matte lcd (1.61 aspect ratio)
Other: Wacom Intuos3 4×6 tablet, Logitech G7 wireless gaming mouse
Hostname: daneel
Purpose: mobile workstation
OS: fedora 10 / Windows XP (never booted)
CPU: Intel Atom 270 (1.6 GHz)
RAM: 1 GiB DDR2
Graphics: Intel 945GME Integrated
Drives: 160 GiB SATA
Monitor: 10″ led-lit lcd (aspect ratio 1.7)
Other: this is an Eee PC 1000HE
Hostname: unknown
Purpose: mobile workstation
OS: fedora 10
CPU: Intel Pentium III 700 MHz
RAM: 256 MiB PC100
Graphics: S3 Savage
Drives: 15 GiB IDE
Monitor: 14.1″ lcd
Other: this is a Toshiba Satellite 4300 Pro
Hostname: tulah
Purpose: gaming console
Hardware: Nintendo Wii
Software: The Homebrew Channel has been installed on this Wii via the Twilight Hack.
Hostname: sony
Purpose: gaming console
Hardware: Microsoft Xbox
Software: This Xbox has been softmodded, and boots to Xbox Media Center as the default dashboard.
Hostname: leeda
Purpose: backup server
OS: freenas 0.69b1 (FreeBSD 6.3)
CPU: Intel Celeron 400 MHz
RAM: 384 MiB PC133
Board: unknown
Graphics: onboard, unknown
Drives: 1x 250 GiB IDE
Monitor: headless
Hostname: niles
Purpose: router / firewall
OS: OpenWRT 0.9
Hardware: Linksys WRT54G v. 3
Links: 4x 10/100 MB LAN Ethernet ports, 1x 10/100 MB WAN Ethernet port, Wireless B/G access point
Infrastructure
Network Topology
navi, neera, leeda, and a gigabit switch are currently connected to niles’ LAN ports. The switch goes to the living room, where sony connects to it. daneel, unknown, and tulah connect through niles’ wireless access point.
Consistent IP addresses are delivered through static DHCP with dnsmasq, which also handles DNS for the local network. Outbound connection is a 5 Mbps down / 384 Kbps up broadband cable connection, provided by Time Warner Cable.
Internal Services
leeda offers an nfs export that serves as a backup location; the other machines on the network mount this export on /backup using autofs.
navi offers an nfs export with various data. neera mounts this export on /data using autofs.
navi also serves two web sites using IP-based vhosts. These host ampache (for remote music control) and torrentflux (for consolidated downloading).
leeda and sony also serve web content in the form of control UIs.
Remote Access
Remote access to my home network is limited to SSH, and requires port-knocking with one-time sequences and ssh RSA keys as detailed in this post. I use the SSH connection to forward the various internal web servers to local ports.
Backup Strategy
A script runs on both neera and navi nightly; this script rsync’s /home (for both machines) and /data (for navi) to leeda. It uses LVM snapshots to ensure that the data being backed up doesn’t change during the transfer.
Eventually, leeda’s disk will be synced weekly (or bi-weekly) with an external hard drive. Two external drives will be used, and will be cycled monthly; the drive currently cycled out (the last monthly backup) will be stored off-site.
