Don Marti

Fri 10 Jul 2009 11:07:46 AM PDT

New home network setup

Just took down the old NAT/firewall/AP box, which gave us nothing but trouble, and put in this setup instead.

That's an original "Fonera" access point from FON, a Netgear 10/100 switch, a Linksys NSLU2 "slug" running Debian, and a Seagate USB hard drive.

Yes, that's more boxes and cables that what was there before, but there's now a lot of storage, and I unplugged two old, warm-running wall warts (one for the old NAT/AP box, one for the old switch) and connected three light, cool, switching wall warts. So there's a little progress anyway.

The Linksys is 132.71 BogoMIPS, and I remember running a real mail server/web proxy on a 486 with a tenth of that. The low-end Alphas aren't much beefier than the slug, and people used to run real stuff on those. It's a real Linux box that runs dead quiet, except for the drive of course. Memory is only 32MB, but I ran a Linux box with X and Netscape in half that. Everything looks fine except that BIND is using 44.7% of RAM. Maybe I'll switch to a lightweight caching-only nameserver instead.

Besides nameserver duties, the slug is doing NAT, DHCP, and NTP. Nifty stuff included in the ARM version of Debian includes sshd (pretty essential) and screen, which is nice to have.

I'm going to hang onto the switch for temporary networks, but the old firewall box is going to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center.

sudo apt-get install git-core

And finally, I just did the above command line, and cloned hemp: the HEadless Music Player, a small git repo. Now pushing this blog to the slug for backup. sshd is using a majority of the CPU, according to top, but it's working. Nice to have an extra place to back up projects. It's about two seconds to do a git push with no changes.