My Home Network.

So, my house is slowly becoming mine.  This place is pretty good.  But.. yaknow.. a geek like me needs some hardware to back himself up. 

Since this is "my" house, and I get to do what I want.  I decided I needed a decent home network.  I'm not going to go crazy like some of my friends, and former coworkers who have full on ISP grade networks in their house.  Which while impressive, and drool worthy, just aren't what I need. 

Here's what I've arranged for myself.  I have a good Wi-Fi router, a 5 port Gigabit Switch, a PogoPlug, (for now) a 1.5Tb drive, and a 20meg internet connection courtesy of Comcast. 

The D-Link DIR-632 has a built in 8 port 10/100 hub on top of the WAN interface.  Which is nice.  And I could have forgone the Gigabit switch.  But there's something silly about having a media sharing network in your house and not getting as much bandwidth as you can.

Cutting to the chase, a couple years ago I read about this wonderful little device, called the Pogoplug.  A bit of incredible bit of industrial design that's backed up with a moderately powerfully linux computer and a nice little cloud offering by Pogoplug.  https://pogoplug.com/  Obviously, visit them when you can. 

As an aside.  I think this is where I first learned about them.  Gizmodo Article about the PogoPlug

Since I am paying for my own power now, I figured going low power would be to my advantage.  And while running a server is cool... running a cool server is cooler.  (Sorta reminds me of Zod..   That reminds me, I need to do an article about my webserver.) The PogoPlug was going to be just that.  I bought it with the idea that it would be ready, straight out of the box to do my bidding.  Sadly, it doesn't do everything I hoped.   Heck my $15 Chinese network enabled USB device did more.  But, this is an open device, so.. I can make things happen. 

From the PogoPlug website, you can get yourself a login to your pogoplug.  Root access!  Got that, you get root ssh access!  So, I followed this tutorial on how to install other packages: http://aaronrandall.blogspot.com/2011/03/customising-your-pogoplug.html  Which was a good start.  Now my big goal was to be able to mount drives directly on windows boxes. 

Step, the next, was to install samba.  Oh look, a tutorial on installing samba!  http://aaronrandall.blogspot.com/2011/10/installing-samba-on-pogoplug.html 

And right out of the box, it worked.  Well.. "right out of modding box." 

I think I like it.