Pete's Log: Laundry Room Data Center
Entry #1873, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 42 years old.)
I've made some upgrades. But first let me recap.
When we bought our house, we made the room that is now JB's room our office. And so this is where it made sense to have the modem and other peripherals. The technician who came out to hook up our internet found that the signal to the house was strong enough, but because the house had been wired to have a phone jack basically in every room, the signal into the office was not strong enough. Since we had no intention of using any of those phone jacks for phones, we gave him the OK to cut the lines to every room but the office. And all was well.
Until JB came along. Initially when we converted the office to her room, we left the router there, since that was the only room that still had a connected phone jack. But time went on and she became both mobile and curious. The router had to move. The phone line comes into our house in our laundry room and after inspecting I found this situation:
Ugly, but after much tracing, I was able to rewire things such that the white box in the picture above was the one jack in the house connected to the outside signal. So I was able to move the router to the laundry room (conveniently located in the basement near where the office had been relocated to) and things were well for some time. After a few months, our internet started becoming unreliable, and the technician who came out this time took one look and decided to upgrade us to fiber. I took this opportunity to connect esgerbeastie to the router via ethernet instead of wifi to take advantage of the gigabit connection.
So that was the status quo until today. In the top picture, you'll notice the incoming fiber box (technical term) on the top right (above the fabric softener) and the router on the top left. Behind the router (not visible) is the Philips Hue hub (thanks B).
New today are the NAS (bottom left) and the raspberry pi stack (to the right of the router).
I had outfitted esgerbeast2 with four hard drives in addition to its SSD. When Windows started going bad on me and I found I couldn't get Linux to install on esgerbeast2, one of the things I tried was removing the raid configuration on those drives. It didn't work, but I never got them connected again. When I upgraded to esgerbeastie, I never hooked those drives back up, because my new motherboard didn't really have the SATA ports to make it sensible. So today I bought a 4-drive NAS and finally put those drives back to use again. Lots more to configure, but it's exciting.
I also started a raspberry pi stack. I installed Home Assistant on the bottom one and Nagios Enterprise Monitoring Server on the top one. Looking for excuses to build out the stack. Also have lots of configuring left to do. And cable management. But it's been a fun exercise so far.