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Frobozz Has The Proper Hardware

Current Configuration

Networking Gear

The first photo (right) shows the top third of my equipment rack, which holds the networking gear. The very top space is empty. The wires on the far right are Ethernet cables for our little LAN.

Just below the empty top space is a rack shelf and on the left side of the shelf (almost invisible) is a Cisco 678 DSL modem/router. The router is in bridging mode (not actually routing), and the connection is SDSL with a line speed that is 640 kbps in both directions. More about this on the right connection page.

On the right side of the shelf (with a white label on its face) is a SonicWALL SOHO/10 firewall appliance. The SonicWALL uses stateful inspection technology. It also logs anything it thinks is weird and e-mails me about it.

The next two spaces below that are an experiment named Philo. Philo has an LS-120 Super Floppy, CD-ROM drive, and a hard drive bolted to his lid because his case is too small inside (plus being stuffed full of other things). Philo runs OpenBSD Unix and when complete will live on the wild side of the firewall.

Just below Philo is another rack shelf holding Ethernet and phone-line surge suppressors (we get a lot of lightening in Colorado Springs). Any connection not originating inside the rack gets run through a surge surpressor as I bring it into the rack.

Finally, the thin, pale-gray box below the surge shelf is an HP 2512 Smart Switch, which is very cool and geeky. Besides switching, It does stuff like monitor packet errors and keeps statistics.

Servers & UPS

The second photo (left) shows the bottom two-thirds of my equipment rack.

The large thing at the top of this photo, taking up five rack spaces, is the server Sprocket. Sprocket's main job is to be the Windows Domain Controller for our LAN, LAN file & print server, primary DNS server, time server, and backup for Gobo. Sprocket is running Windows 2000 Server with SP-4 and a bunch of patches. I built Sprocket myself out of new and recycled parts. Lots more about Sprocket in the notes for the third photo.

The black thing below Sprocket is a StarTech, SV831D KVM switch. The keyboard, monitor, and mouse are on extension cables and are located on a table near the equipment rack. Philo, Sprocket, and Gobo are accessed through this device.

Just below the KVM switch is the server Gobo. Gobo's main job is to be the secondary DNS server and to be primary public server for other Internet services (web, world, FTP, e-mail, and whatever else I come up with in the future). All user files on Gobo are mirrored back to Sprocket, then Sprocket backs them up on tape Gobo is running Windows 2000 Server with SP-4 and a bunch of patches.

Gobo is a Gateway 935 series server featuring; a Pentium III 1.133 GHz processor (dual capable), 1/2 GB of registered ECC SDRAM (it can correct errors on the fly and is expandable to 4 GB), the ServerWorks SS-III LE chipset (pretty hot stuff), a generic video interface, dual 10/100-TX Ethernet ports, a serial & parallel port, three hot-swap Ultra-160 SCSI drive bays with one Seagate Cheetah 36 GB disk drive, skinny floppy & CD-ROM drives, and two 64-bit 66 MHz full sized PCI slots (currently empty).

The white box in the bottom of the equipment rack is an APC Smart-UPS 1000. When the power goes away, this runs everything in the rack plus the video monitor for up to 20 minutes, then it shuts everyone down gracefully so data is written out to the disk drives and nothing is lost. The APC Smart-UPS series will log power quality and internal conditions and talks to the servers via serial interface ports. The vast majority of power outages here in the Springs last only a few seconds each (typically wind or rain effects), but there may be a dozen or more outages in a bad day (we only have three or four bad days per year). Power outages exceeding 20 minutes can happen, but typically less than once per year.

The small silver box, above and behind the Smart-UPS is the homemade surge surpressor for the Cisco 678, the SonicWALL, and Philo. It is plugged into the output of the UPS.

Finally that little multicolored gizmo lying next to the UPS is a leftover serial interface surge suppressor and serial cable. The deceased server Babar used to stand in that space next to the UPS and this thing was plugged into Babar. I forgot to pick it up before I took the photo.

Sprocket, up close

The third photo (right) is a close up of Sprocket in an intimate pose, not wearing his door. A few highlights of Sprocket's configuration are: An Enlight EN-8950 case with 400W power supply. An older AIR P6LXI server-class motherboard, with a 300 MHz Pentium II, and 448 MB of ECC SDRAM (ECC RAM can correct errors on the fly). Two Adaptec SCSI controllers; a 2940 U/UW runs the DVD and tape drives, while a 2100S U-160 RAID controller handles the disk drives. The tape drive (lower right) is a Tandberg SLR-100 (50 GB native, 100 GB compressed). The disk storage subsystem has five Seagate Cheetah U-160 18 GB disk drives running as a RAID-5 array, which is then carved up into three partitions. The disk drives are housed in an Enlight EN-8720 hot-swap drive bay (center). Total available disk storage is 68 GB and the RAID controller can keep the machine running even with the total failure of any single disk drive.

A Little History

Before I got Gobo, I had a server named Babar. Babar was made from almost entirely recycled parts. An Asus motherboard from 1995 that was maxed out with a 100 MHz Pentium and 128 MB of SDRAM, and a bunch of surplus SCSI disk drives running on a FastWide controller. Because of these hardware limitations, I ran Windows NT 4.0 Server on Babar.

Babar was doing what is now Sprocket's job (except for the LAN file server bit) and Sprocket was doing what is now Gobo's job (with the added duty of being the LAN file server). When Babar died I got Gobo.

Babar was gone, but not for long. He has been repaired and resurrected for a special experiment. Experiment done, he stands ready to begin experiment number two; helping me learn Linux.