Too much LAN for one man?
Over the weekend I was in conversation via e-mail with The Other Fellow. Over the course of our correspondence I mentioned my setup here at home. Later on that evening I began to realise just how ludicrous my setup has become.
I have four different networks, three wireless access points, and an unearthly amount of machines. To give you an idea of the chaos I made up a lovely diagram which is below. (There will be a fourth wireless access point in place soon but that is for a particular plan that I’m up to. More on that sometime in the future.)
The Sun Sparcs and the HP-UX machine are only powered up occasionally. I use a Dell TFT monitor which is the only display in regular use. Other than that I have a 19in Mitsubishi CRT that I use only when setting up or repairing other machines. I’ve probably mentioned this before but the room is on it’s own electrical circuit which actually has it’s own meter on it and the room is currently consuming between €1.50 and €2 of electricity per day.
I bet you thought it might be more! Most of them are desktops and spent quite a lot of time idling away consuming between 90 and 120 watts of electricity.
If you look at the diagram and are wondering about the External WLAN limited to 1Mb, this is the access point and network that I use whenever I have a nasty virus and or spyware infected PC or laptop for repair.
Anyway, Click on the diagram for a bigger version:
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Why do I get the feeling that the actual setup isn’t quite so neat and tidy?
Why don’t you just use a laptop like the rest of us mere mortals?
Considering some virtual machines instead of this hardware of yours? :]
@Richard – You are certainly right about it not being tidy
I do have a laptop that I use quite often. I didn’t include it in the diagram as I only wanted to chart the wired machines.
@Frob – I originally started out with all my sites on a virtual machine. (OpenBSD at first). It’s all recently started to get out of hand
I’m planning to buy a big decent machine with loads of RAM to use as a virtual server host but that could be a while yet until I can get some money together..
I feel all insecure now! I just have the main desktop and server plugged into a router, file share activated on all computers and laptops around the house and only recently I’ve beefed up security!
It was a setup similar to yours that I started out with Aaron. Then I got bitten by the monster that wouldn’t allow me to get rid of anything. Now I have to be careful when I walk around my computer room to avoid accidentially hanging myself on all the Cat5 cable that is all over the place