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+++ x+++**
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Computers
Here are the core specs for all of my computers. Enjoy!
giskard
Purpose: my primary workstation / desktop
OS: fedora 15
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
RAM: 4 GiB DDR2
Board: ASUS M3A
Graphics: Nvidia 430GT
Drives: 320 GiB, 160 GiB, 1 TiB (all SATA)
Monitor: 19″ matte lcd (1.61 aspect ratio)
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
daneel
Purpose: mobile workstation
OS: fedora 10 / Windows XP
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
domokun
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
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
giskard and neera are currently connected to a gigabit switch, which connects to one of niles’ LAN ports. niles is situated in our living room, where it is also connected to our classic PS3 and Google TV.
Consistent IP addresses are delivered through static DHCP with dnsmasq, which also handles DNS for the local network. Outbound connection is an 8 Mbps down / 768 Kbps up broadband cable connection, provided by Time Warner Cable.
Internal Services
giskard offers an nfs export with various data. neera and the laptops mount this export on /data using autofs.
giskard serves out media over UPnP using mediatomb. The PS3 is able to understand and play most of the data provided this way.
giskard also runs transmission-daemon. transmission-daemon watches a share in Dropbox, which means I can start a torrent on giskard from any computer in the world (and I’ve got some scripts that make it really easy to do from my phone).
Remote Access
The elaborate setup in this post is no longer in use; memory limitations on niles forced me to abandon it. I still use SSH as my only means of remote access, and it runs on a non-standard port on an SELinux-enabled machine.
Backup Strategy
giskard and neera both have a backup script, run manually, that backs up to a 1 TB external hard drive. The plan is to eventually have separate backup drives for each machine, and to use eSATA throughout.
