Denis Lemire's Site

I’m now back to my regular ol’ routine, just finished a week long “staycation.” So other than spend quality time with the family, what does a system administrator who doesn’t have to go to work for a week do with his time? Pull some CAT5 and clean up my home network, of course!

Inferno, my FreeBSD home gateway, file, web and everything else server has been irritating me with its typical PC fan whirring for too long. It was high time to uproot the beast from its cozy spot on my office floor, where it sat for nearly eight years and drag it to the basement and finally bring tranquility to my office.

This involved running six new cables from my electrical/laundry room to its new home in the basement’s spare bedroom. One Ethernet run to its LAN interface, one for its WiFi interface (I keep WiFi access to my network on a separate segment), one for my recently acquired Xerox Phaser 8400 printer and one spare for future use. I also needed two RG-6 runs, one for the cable modem which now sits downstairs and one for an old spare CRT TV as per the wife’s request.

After a long day of running and terminating cable and dragging equipment around, I ran into one snag: the NIC for the WiFi segment of my network was not seeing my piece of junk Tranzeo AP. I mistakingly saved this AP from AirSurfer’s dumpster several years ago and have been looking for an excuse to get rid of it ever since. After testing the cable run to the opposite side of the basement where the AP resides, I determined all was well and the Tranzeo pile of garbage was the worthy owner of the blame.

Upon hearing my tales of woe and coming to terms with what this meant for her iPod touch web-surfing habit, Jessie was quick to suggest we give the Tranzeo AP the fate it deserves and replace it with a far more capable AirPort Extreme. Who was I to argue? The Airport has been configured in bridge mode as I still intend to leave the routing duties to Inferno.

In my twisted reality, the aging beige Antec case in combination with the old 19″ CRT I dug up, alongside the Phaser, plain old Fujitsu keyboard and ancient desk (also saved from AirSurfer’s dumpster years ago) give the corner an almost retro-computing look. Somehow I find the whole setup appealing in contrast to my shinier, sleeker, far more modern and most importantly far quieter collection of Apple desktops upstairs.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Apple, FreeBSD, Household, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.