endellion.me.uk

Network

I am quite a deviant at heart and love to look over web pages illustrating other people's home networks, so it's only fair that I should present mine. I'm told it's overly complicated for a home network which, at the end of the day, only has two real users with three desktop computers between them, but there's also the web server and the mail server and the virtual machines and the routers and their double redundancy to think of.

First an admission: I don't actually care much for hardware. I am not into overclocking, flashing lights or gaming, brand names mean diddly squat to me, and beyond regular maintenance and repair requirements, I don't actually know very much about it at all. The same can be said for software. I have various operating systems on various computers. I tend to use linux a lot in server situations for reasons of stability and expense. My webserver uptime was 430 days, and that was between two power cuts :-). Try that with Microsoft! But all the desktop machines have Windows, and I really can't work out why people get themselves into such a froth over these two systems. (I'm not mentioning Apple here, as I can quite understand the froth there!)

I wanted some more IP addresses, but my ISP sells them rather dearly, so just one will have to do right now (until I convince my better half that they are worth the money, somehow). This one IP address is acquired by a rather mundane little piece of household consumer router: a D-Link DSL-G604T which I've had for years. When we went with Be* ( bethere.co.uk) as our ISP (recommended! even the forum is https :-)) we were sent this Speedtouch 760 wireless router which did not want to do anything wirelessly and had ports open to the outside world. But Be* uses ADSL2+ and the G604T didn't. It would connect, but only at 8 meg. Using a Russian software I flashed the G604T into a G624T, which does use ADSL2+ -- problem solved, it hasn't even needed a reboot since. It reports slightly lower speeds than the Speedtouch did, but there's still 16 megs of it which will do I suppose.

This router does NAT for a number of devices. First off, the webserver and mailserver. Secondly, Thor, who handles all the Virtual Machines. Third, another router. And lastly, a wireless access point. This is also a router, which I am going to do some load-balancing experiments with.

The second router is a homebrew cobbled from an old board with a Celeron and some little harddrives, running ClarkConnect. This has our LAN behind it. Port forwarding is so complicated that the lodgers we used to have were given one port each in TCP and UDP, like it or lump it.

Thor is my great big Compaq DL-580 with quad Xeons, really old and really capable. This runs the virtual machines (including two more routers) and also acts as backup mail server.

I'm taking this opportunity to list most of the hardware I have, including the obsolete & redundant stuff. It is a history of my involvement with computers more than anything, as I am not one of those people hanging on for dear life to 8-bit computing in 12 colours. My favourite game of all time was Boulderdash, but when I had the chance to play it a while back, 100% emulated, I thought it was horrid and went back to playing Oblivion. The only good of Moore's Law is that these games get to be faster with better graphics. The Bard's Tale (on the Amiga) was a great game at the time but it is perfectly unplayable now. Having said that, the PC remake a couple of years ago sucked, lacking all the hard puzzles.