My wife knew when I asked her to order some new hardware on Thursday that the next few days is going to be interesting. Thankfully the newly arrived Sims 3 runs on both Mac and Windows, and I only realised the irony when I remembered watching her move her Mac into the lounge and out of the study that evening, since she has lived through my home network upgrades once too often. I have already had a fairly straight forward network setup. A single, old P3-800 running ipCop for a firewall, notable for shutting down without fail every 10 hours, a Acer TravelMate 5620 (2.0Ghz with 4GB memory) acting as Domain Controller/Media server with 3 external USB drives for storage. My wife sports a Quad-Core 2.8Ghz, 4GB memory powerhouse on her desk along with her 13” MacBook. My desk featured an underpowered Dual Core 1.8Ghz, 4GB memory desktop and my 13” MacBook. Both the MacBook machines have 2.0Ghz processors, 4GB of memory and 250GB hard drives.
At the top of the cupboard stood a machine I purchased 2 years ago, less processor, which died in the great power failure scandal of the Musgrave home. By ordering some missing hardware this machine would be joined by a second to provide some additional hardware for improving some of the systems my wife and I have become dependant on. The original plan was fairly simple. The underpowered 1.8Ghz will be upgraded to a new 2.5Ghz processor, the old P3-800 replaced with the machine from the cupboard and a new machine sporting a 2.5Ghz processor and 4GB of RAM will take on the role as a virtualization server. The process sounded simple, however as my wife knew when she saw me unwrap the first processor, it’s going to be anything but simple.
The first challenge involved the upgrade of the current 1.8Ghz machine. Replacing the processor was a straightforward task as to be expected. Until trying to run the new Virtual PC on Windows 7 highlighting that the processor does not support virtualization, contra to what I was informed by the various “experts” I consulted before the purchase. A quick visit to the Intel website confirmed this. However this was not reason for concern, as the need for virtualization support on the home network is not that big, however it did take Hyper-V out of the equation completely. The fun began when installing the new SATA DVD Writer, as the power supply SATA cables where not long enough to reach the both the DVD Writer and the current 500GB SATA hard drive. Thankfully this was resolved by using a SATA power connector I had handy. Sadly this particular machine ended up spending the bulk of the next few days turned off, as other machines needed my attention.
I do however find it amazing that casing designs has still not evolved, and power supply manufacturers have still not seen the need to provide multiple connectors which can be swapped at will. Why force only one or two types of connectors? Rather provide both with the power supply, or alternatively make it the task of the hardware manufacturers to provide a suitable connector. They already provide SATA or IDE cables with the motherboard and the DVD drives?
The impromptu visit by my parents, who we haven’t seen since December, claiming they wanted to see the new litter of puppies Zena recently surprised us with, put a hold on some of the upgrade process for most of the day, leaving the upgrades to happen in the evenings. They arrived midday on Thursday and stayed until early Sunday morning. It was good to see them again, since my dad recently retired and needed to get out. He is starting a new contract with his previous employer today.
The replacement of the ipCop machine proved extremely interesting. The installation of the processor was again extremely simple, however the casing and motherboard requires that the power connector, IDE cable and memory has to be removed before a hard drive can easily slide into the appropriate bay. Secondly the IDE cable proved to short to reach both the DVD writer and hard drive, and a frustrating trip to the local computer store revealed that there is shortage of SATA power extensions and power splitters. The end result meant dismantling half of the case to move the DVD writer a few bays down. The reason being motherboards these days only come with a single IDE controller.
The initial 15 minute upgrade turned out to take more then an hour and a half including the road trip, and the subsequent attempt to load FreeBSD based pfSense on the 120GB hard drive, left the drive trashed and un-partitioned once the installation rebooted. The short version, after trashing, un-mounting and replacing the drive 3 times, defeat was accepted and ipCop was loaded on the repaired 120GB drive. However, the new firewall machine, christened Rosalie, now sports a 120GB hard drive, 1.8Ghz Dual Core processor and 2GB of memory. Loaded with ipCop, Advanced Proxy and Update Accelerator it has already caused a major saving in the bandwidth bill, so ROI already paying off.
The unwrapping of the new case and motherboard revealed the final set of problems. The new casing only provides one normal power connector and 3 SATA power connectors. The problem, 2 SATA and 2 IDE hard drives need to be installed. Along with an IDE DVD drive. Problem number 2 was related to the motherboard which only sported one IDE controller. I then decided to swap the 250GB SATA drive with the 500GB SATA drive in my own machine, which introduced the final set of problems. Neither the Universal Boot CD or Hiren’s Boot CD offers USB drivers compatible with the machines I own, and I didn’t have enough connectors to fit all the hardware in a single machine. Using a USB external case to clone to the 500GB to the 250GB was therefore not a solution, nor was booting of an external USB DVD writer. Thankfully and amazingly the Ghost 8 BartPE CD I found in a pile of discarded CD’s and tried as a last resort happily detected all the USB devices, and even more happily copied the Windows 7 RC installation from the one drive to other without any errors. 200GB of data transferred in under an hour.
The goal post is getting closer, and I decided due to the lack of Hyper-V support, to go with a tried and tested (in my case) virtualization solution. Linux with VMWare Server 2.0. I have worked extensively in the past with CentOS, Ubuntu, Slackware and SUSE, and wasn’t particularly fond of any of them. Also the installation DVD’s I had was only for the 32Bit versions, and was 2-3 versions behind. This made the Fedora 10 Live CD download of 500+ MB very attractive, considering that VMWare Server 2.0 for Linux weighs in at a hefty 450+ MB. Before leaving on the Saturday day trip to Margate, both downloads where started.
Once home, and after writing the Fedora Live CD to disc, the installation process was amazing easily. The machine was installed and running within 15 minutes. The first major change a made was to point the updates to the local mirror hosted at mirror.ac.za. Update Accelerator happily ensured that the 350MB+ updates where cached on Rosalie, and the new Fedora machine, named Esme, was quickly brought up to date. I have always struggled getting my head around a new flavour of Linux, however I will admit that the Fedora made things easy. Within an hour I had the USB storage module preloading to allow the mounting of the two external IDE drives at start-up, installed and configured samba for file sharing, installed and configured VMWare Server, enabled VNC access to the machine and installed Webmin. Esme, sporting a 2.5Ghz processor with 4GB of memory, will be hosting a few new machines, a Domain Controller (Carlisle), a Database server (Victoria), a SharePoint 2007 Server (Emmett) and a TFS 2010 Server (Jasper). Lastly Alice, the Acer 5620, will become a dedicated media server using TVersity and Firefly.
I sighed with relief when the wife could eventually move her MacBook back into the study, late Sunday night. However she didn’t need to remind me that my simple home network upgrade cost close on 30 man hours and a lot of swearing. Home networking can never be called simple.
PS: Some may have noticed an underlying theme in the machine names. the home network machines are named after Twilight characters, with my wife’s desktop and macbook being called Isabella and Renesmee, and my two machines named Edward and Jacob. the domain however is named after our company, although i did toy with the idea of renaming the domain to Twilight.
