…hes super-geekin out!
Yeah. All day on Saturday (I know I mentioned it, but my life is running like a computer with too many programs open – everything may be getting done, but its all moving annoyingly slowly, too.) I messed with my home network. I put a staple through the 40-year-old phone cord and had to replace that (with no way to know if it was going to work till it was too late, by the way). I had to crawl up in the attic and drill holes into the spaces between the walls so I could drop the network cable that I made two months ago into the crevice, threading it out the hole where the radiator pipe used to go. It was drilling blind, because even though I had a good roadmap of where things were (“Gosh, that must be the dropdown for the light in the closet, so the wall must be here, then I move 16 inches along the wall to the north…” – you get the idea.), it was hard to tell where the holes had to be drilled to make sure I was not only directly above the already-present hole in the wall but also free of obstacles in between. Not fun. And dirty.
But now? Now??? Hells yes! Now I have XBox live in the living room. Now I have a WEP-secured (no jokes about how the FBI just proved that an oxymoron, please) wireless network covering the whole house. Now I have web access for the eBox (which still isnt working, incidently – my kingdom for a PC speaker!). Now I have Gigabit-ready cable running the length of the house that forms the backbone of a future-proof installation. Now the Sneaker-beast is online on its own, now the laptops are online and free to roam wherever (thanks, Belkin54g, but your signal was just too weak to be useful everywhere).
I hope youll forgive a little exuberance, but I did manage to get my dedicated firewall box up and running with absolutely no hassle (thanks to the Smoothwall team for a foolproof installation disk), despite swapping drives, RAM and cabling at the last minute. Three NICs? No problem. DHCP server? Running and instantly available to requesting PCs. Remote maintenance? Got that, too.
Now its time, O patient readers, for phase I of JVDS. I now start preliminary research into secure, shared storage solutions using off-the-shelf parts and Open Source software to bring you the latest and greatest in data warehousing. As someone largely ignorant of what this is going to require, Im planning on it being a slow process. The research is just one step, of course, because I also have to implement, test, and roll-out the service. If you know what Im talking about with any specificity, I insist that you help me out. Im not nearly smart enough to do this alone. Ive got the drive, the connection and the hardware, but no know-how, and thats a dangerous thing.
