Mat on Macs

I fear that I’m afflicted with a terrible disease whose name I’ve just discovered. While browsing the smoothwall.org community I saw someone else noting that he was also afflicted with this disease and he gave its name. We are both suffering from the “fix it till it’s broke” syndrome. Just can’t stop; if it’s there to be mucked with… well ya just gotta. So my latest project: a home server. Here’s the plan:

What the image shows (click for larger version) is my planned home network. I recently purchased an old graphite G3 iMac DV SE (more details in a subsequent post) to be the home server itself. I’m planning to do several things with the server including running it as:

1) a live backup server (perhaps with the recently released Mac app, Slingshot)
2) a more or less always on bittorrent client, using the open source client Azureus. The great thing about Azureus is that it can be controlled both via a web-interface and a dashboard widget. That way I can start CUPERTINO downloading torrents from one of the other computers on the network or even across the internet (e.g. from work).
3) an iTunes server (potentially streaming across the net–maybe DOT-TUNES).
4) a VLC server (potentially streaming across the net)
5) a homemade .mac-type server for syncing, etc.
6) a file server (via firewire external drives)

To make all of this work I’m also planning to build a linux firewall router out of an old Athlon PC I had laying around and the Smoothwall project. The PC will have three NICs, one for the cable modem out to the net, one for an orange DMZ network for CUPERTINO, and one for a green fully protected internal network connected to a wireless access point. The WAP will then provide 802.11g connections to my G4 Powerbook CLARE and my Intel iMac BONAVENTURE. Since I’m going to be doing live backup you might wonder why I wouldn’t want a wired network, particularly since both CLARE and BONAVENTURE have gigabit ethernet. While I would actually like BONAVENTURE to be wired, I can’t easily do this given my physical location. Furthermore, I was alarmed to see how many reports there are of ethernet ports being knocked out by electrical storms. I would just as soon insulate my new iMac from that if possible. Furthermore, once the initial sync is done (which I will probably do wired) the live backup should not involve moving that much data (i.e. less than a gigabyte) per day.

I will be making several posts over the next few weeks to describe how the project is going and how what sorts of problems I run into and I ran into a big one right off the bat. In any case, I promise I won’t stop fixing it till it’s broke!