Office Network Updates

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on server-side changes. There are two main server tasks that I’ve been focusing on. The first task is a new weather forecast server for Seasonality users. I’ll talk more about this in a later post. The second task is a general rehash of computing resources on the office network.

Last year I bought a new server to replace the 5 year old weather server I was using at the time. This server is being coloed at a local ISPs datacenter. I ended up with a Dell R710 with a Xeon E5630 quad-core CPU and 12GB of RAM. I have 2 mirrored RAID volumes on the server. The fast storage is handled by 2 300GB 15000 RPM drives. I also have a slower mirrored RAID using 2 500GB 7200 RPM SAS drives that’s used mostly to store archived weather data. The whole system is running VMware ESXi with 5-6 virtual machines, and has been working great so far.

Adding this new server meant that it was time to bring the old one back to the office. For its time, the old server was a good box, but I was starting to experience reliability issues with it in a production environment (which is why I replaced it to begin with). The thing is, the hardware is still pretty decent (dual core Athlon, 4GB of RAM, 4x 750GB disks), so I decided I would use it as a development server. I mounted it in the office rack and started using it almost immediately.

A development box really doesn’t need a 4 disk RAID though. I currently have a Linux file server in a chassis with 20 drive bays. I can always use more space on the file server, so it made sense to consolidate the storage there. I moved the 4 750GB disks over to the file server (setup as a RAID 5) and installed just a single disk in the development box. This brings the total redundant file server storage up past 4 TB.

The next change was with the network infrastructure itself. I have 2 Netgear 8 port gigabit switches to shuffle traffic around the local network. Well, one of them died a few days ago so I had to replace it. I considered just buying another 8 port switch to replace the dead one, but with a constant struggle to find open ports and the desire to tidy my network a bit, I decided to replace both switches with a single 24 port Netgear Smart Switch. The new switch, which is still on its way, will let me setup VLANs to make my network management easier. The new switch also allows for port trunking, which I am anxious to try. Both my Mac Pro and the Linux file server have dual gigabit ethernet ports. It would be great to trunk the two ports on each box for 2 gigabits of bandwidth between those two hosts.

The last recent network change was the addition of a new wireless access point. I’ve been using a Linksys 802.11g wireless router for the last several years. In recent months, it has started to drop wireless connections randomly every couple of hours. This got to be pretty irritating on devices like laptops and the iPad where a wired network option really wasn’t available. I finally decided to break down and buy a new wireless router. There are a lot of choices in this market, but I decided to take the easy route and just get an Apple Airport Extreme. I was tempted to try an ASUS model with DD-WRT or Tomato Firmware, but in the end I decided I just didn’t have the time to mess with it. So far, I’ve been pretty happy with the Airport Extreme’s 802.11n performance over the slower 802.11g.

Looking forward to finalizing the changes above. I’ll post some photos of the rack once it’s completed.