Starting with the internet, I need broadband of some sort, but price is always a factor. I'm not going to spend ~$50 a month on this. Luckily, ATT now serves up "naked DSL", meaning DSL without phone service. We qualify, but not for very much. The maximum speed is 768k down / 128k up. Not great if you want to share linux ISO's with nerds across the globe, but fast enough to serve my craigslist addiction. It's only $20/mo, which is really good (remember paying $20 for 56k? or 28k?), but a little quicker speed would be nice. ATT promised they'd let me know when they were ready to take more of my money every month. $30/mo for a nice 3Mbps service would be a sweet spot.
Phone - I didn't really want a home phone, as we both have cellys now, but Amy works from home occasionally, and will be tied up to the phone upwards of several hours per day. That eats through a cell plan a little too quickly. But I didn't want to pay $20/mo for a phone line, I was so excited to get a naked DSL plan. So first, I looked at Skype, which seemed to be quite a bargain at $3/mo. But that only lets you call out. Skype In is like another $6/mo. Bah, that's too complicated, and I've gotta worry about getting a skype phone on top of that. Enter T-mobile, with their @home service. A $10/mo VOIP plan that uses real phones via a router. It even does QOS (Quality of Service for the non-nerds), which makes the phone work without drops, even when Drew and I are youtubing vintage incredible hulk cartoons. And it's unlimited minutes per month, which is very hard to run out of.
On to the rest of the network. We're going to have a roomy dedicated office upstairs, which will house the desktop PC, as well as the upcoming storage array. I'm hoping to start out with at least a couple of terabyte disks, mirrored to each other, to make sure I don't lose any photos (Amy would kill me), along with other niceties, such as movies and music. I'll also put the network printer up there. For now, I'll use a wireless ethernet bridge to network that room to the rest of the house.
In the living room, I'll put a modded xbox for watching divx movies, and maybe the HTPC project. Oh, I guess the Wii will live in there, too. Another wireless bridge for connecting it all to the router. As for the rest of the house, it will just be our lappity tops, which will just go wireless. Speaking of wireless, I'll step it up a bit to WPA in the next place. We were using WEP at the old place and were plenty happy with it, but I know how security guys get about those things, and I don't really want anyone hacking my network in the new neighborhood and stealing my megahurtz and rams. They're my rams, and they're for me.
Down the road, I'll have the house wired for cat-6, and eventually put a gig switch in somewhere. It's so cheap, I can't afford not to! I do remember the days of $300 4-port gig switches, and now that they're going for a song down at Fry's, I might as well. We'll do network drops to the kitchen, living room, office, and maybe a couple other choice locations. Wireless is nice, but after we're wired, streaming video to remote locations about the house will actually work stutter-free. Bliss!
Once I'm all networked out, I'll need a new piece of iron to do my fileserving from. That's when I wait for a weekend when Eric is up, and we take a trip to Fry's and get a quad-core something-or-other and he talks me into putting Solaris on it and showing me ZFS and its black magic. I'll have him on speed dial for when I break it. Which I will. Daily. I'm pretty sure he can remote into it and fix stuff from his place. Even through my firewall. Even when I'm unplugged. Those unix guys are tricky.
But before all that, it looks like tonight, we're moving a fridge, maybe a futon, maybe a bedframe. How can I move furniture and appliances when I've got this on my brain?
1 comment:
Release the inner geek!
*drools*
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