Saturday, April 11, 2009

New Coke: The Home Network

We've got some new machines for the inventory:

  • 192.168.22.3: IRIE bare metal, an HP Pavilion Slimline configured to run either CentOS Xen or Windows XP SP3 from the RIT CS Department. Running Xen is a preferred configuration, but with one major deficiency: after all driver issues have been resolved, I'm left with a setup that can't play movies and boots flash videos! Bummer. At least it makes a good fileserver.
  • 192.168.22.48: WinXPSP3 xen cfg, boots under CentOS 5.3 Xen dom0 where everything works fine but network video performance is slow. One minor problem is a clock skew: the system reads UTC time properly from a registry hack, but when the system is left alone for a while, the clock flies ahead by four hours and has to be reset before kerberos authentication can connect to the OpenAFS cell hosted on debunst.rit.edu
  • 192.168.22.1: The router that needs to do the magic so you can connect to either of those new machines on my home network. It's a Linksys RVS4000!
  • 74.74.157.120: The public IP address of my home network.
The list of machines at the office needs to be updated, and a service catalog is soon to be extant.
Customers inquiring about the current state of the system: you can understand that the system is currently in use, and that a new shared instance can be provided at your request, but you should expect an expense of $300-600 for a server of similar quality delivered to your location. Configuration is a further expense that pertains to the state of the system, and I earmark this task at $200 per machine. You can run linux, you can resell services, and you ought to, if you like to help people and make money!

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