Network

[mdlbear]

Went to Central Computer on the way home to pick up a Vantec USB/eSATA external drive enclosure they had on sale -- it will simplify copying data from my fileserver to one of the shiny new 400GB SATA drives, since I won't have to take down the server until all the data's been transferred. A Good Thing.

While I was there, I noticed that Netgear ProSafe 8-port gigabit switches were going for $65, which is about $25 less than Fry's has them. Central is like that -- most things are more expensive, and then there are a few items, like the Netgear switch and most of Antec's cases, that are significantly cheaper. Grabbed it, since the 5-port switch (also a Netgear) in the rack is maxed out.

The 5-port switch will move over to replace the 100Mbit switch that's currently hanging on the wall next to my workstation and its KVM switch -- I use it for laptops and temporary machines of all sorts, including (this month) the Windows 98 machine that I'm planning on using for taxes. (done) (11:12 -- verified that it was, in fact, the machine I used for taxes in 2005, which saves me the trouble of copying the 2005 data.) (11:55 -- replaced the ancient 4-port hub on the DSL side with the 8-port 100Mb switch.)

 

Meanwhile, I have to figure out how I'm going to configure the gateway now that I'm about to have two DSL lines. There are a couple of choices.

• The simplest thing, which ought to work, is just plugging both of them into the hub sitting conveniently between my current DSL modem and the gateway. Dual-home the WAN interface on the gateway, add the necessary firewall rules, bump the routing metric on the old line, and I should be good to go. I'll need a crossover cable -- the old hub doesn't have auto-detection -- but I have one sitting around somewhere. There may be problems, like replies going back through the wrong gateway.
• Add another ethernet card to the gateway. It has an empty slot, so that's pretty easy, too. Requires bouncing the gateway, which I'm foolishly reluctant to do only a month out from a full year of uptime. On the other hand, I want to add disk to the gateway, too, so that's not so unreasonable.
• Configure another machine -- possibly my Linux laptop -- as a secondary router for the old DSL line. Makes for a rather awkward transition; I'd rather not.

Next on today's schedule is organizing the credit-card receipts for tax data-entry. (The checkbook is easier, but I did that Tuesday.)( done)

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, dual-homing the WAN interface could be a little tricky, but, no, you'd be looking at each DSL box's *inside* interface. Only trick there is using a laptop to set the new one to something *other than* 192.168.1.1... but on the same subnet that you're using. Yeah, slam-dunk. Adding another card to the gateway doesn't reduce any of the work you'd have to do in the software...

And you could temporarily add disk to the gateway via USB, and then install it permanently later once you've got your year of uptime. :) (OTOH, if you're like me, your gateway is your ancient crawler of a box that may or may not have USB atall, and if it does, it's probably 1.0 or 1.1, which means USB disk is going to be sloooooowwww... )

(you could *really* jury-rig it by adding the USB drive to another faster machine and NFS mount the sucker... )

But, yeah. The concept of 365 days uptime is just too cool. I had something over 400 days on my colo server, and then the power went down at 3am and my colo guy (in whose basement it lives) didn't notice he was getting cold until it was time to get up, after which the UPS's had all died... alas, the generator kick-in is a manual process currently. And there's a bad pun in there somewhere.)

[mdlbear]

Both DSL boxes are just bridges (presumably with some filtering so that they only pass outbound packets to their own gateway). So on my router I just have to give the outbound interface two different sets of aliases, one set in each provider's network. (Since I have multiple static IP addresses in each network.)

I'm pretty sure the gateway has USB-2.0 (just checked -- it does), so that is indeed a possibility. So far I've avoided setting up NFS on the gateway for security reasons; iSCSI or ATA-over-Ethernet might be fun to play with.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, ATAoE. That sounds fun...

We may be playing with iSCSI here... I don't know if I'm looking forward to that or not.