Just a quick note to say the HSP is on hiatus while I wait to receive a couple of NICs I ordered from Newegg. Once I get those, I should be able to get everything going. I’ve been doing some research online which leads me to think I might be better off going with IPCop rather than smoothwall (ipcop is a fork of smoothwall) since support for a Blue interface is already built into IPCop 1.4.
So to get the Home Server Project started I obviously needed the server. At first I thought about going with a Linux server running on an old Athlon PC I happened to have from the bad old days from before I saw the Mac light. However, after playing around a bit with Ubuntu I decided to just go with what I know–OS X. Now ideally I would be running OS X Server, but I’m not willing to drop $200+ on the project so I’ll just have to go with a regular client version of OS X which nonetheless has a lot of server features available, and which can of course be upgraded with lots of open source server tools. Since I’m doing this project on a shoestring budget I was wondering what sort of Mac I could get for $100 or less. Some eBay searching revealed that 500-600 GHz G3 iMacs were generally going for about $150 and I didn’t want to pay that much. As luck would have it, however, I found a 400 MHz graphite iMac DV SE without a hard drive, but with 512MB of RAM for $68. The RAM was important because OS X is very memory hungry and I didn’t really want to buy it (in fact, at Crucial.com a 512MB stick for this machine runs about $100). Anyway, I bought the iMac and it was delivered a few days later–with shipping it totaled about $100.
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: