Finished reconstructing my network

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kleptophobiac

Supreme [H]ardness
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Sep 24, 2001
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I built the wooden frame for the rack to mount to using spare wood (free!). It has room on the back where a powerstrip and two APC's are mounted. On the left is ghetto-iture made from scrap left over from making the rack mount (from scrap). It holds a monitor and lexmark (IBM) keyboard/trackball combo.

So this is a combined building, modding (getting standard desktops to rackmount), network photo, and network diagram thread.

Diagram:
sashasnetwork-003.png


Photo:
sashas-network-001.jpg


Aluminum bracket I made for rackmounting (I made four of this variety, there's more of a different design):
sashas-network-002.jpg
 
Looks good.

How hard was it to make those rackount brackets? Did you have to bend the Aluminium yourself?
 
That's fairly thick aluminum I got from an Army surplus store. The hardest part was cutting out the notches. I didn't have any tools particularly well suited to that, so I drilled some holes where they belonged, and used a nibbler to clean them up.

As for shaping the aluminum, I used a brake/shear device.
 
Sweet setup! You need to be folding on all those boxes. :D

What software did you use to draw that layout? It looks really professional.

Edit: What range are you getting on that 50' backyard mast?

 
IIRC, the client boxes do fold. :p I've avoided folding on the servers.

The drawings were done in MS Visio, and thanks. ;)

The mast and a homebrew omni antenna have netted me a radius of about 2 miles when LOS is possible. Big buildings and rows of tall trees still cause dead spots within that radius.

It is, however, really sweet to have my own network available in my car within that sort of range. I spend most of my time within that circle, so my car almost always has access. :)

I'll be posting pics of the carputer when I rework it as well (it's extremely sloppy right now)

EDIT:
I fold on geek1, geek2(when it's on... which is rarely), the bench computer, the radio computer, and the green room computer. While the core of my network has been rebuilt, I still have a lot of work to do on the various client machines.

I'll also think about running F@H on my myth backend, file server, and AD server. The router isn't going to... period.
 
2 Mile radius? I can understand that you could pick up a transmission from your mast at that distance - but what laptop adaptor have you got that can transmit that distance back????
 
cyberjt said:
2 Mile radius? I can understand that you could pick up a transmission from your mast at that distance - but what laptop adaptor have you got that can transmit that distance back????
Click to expand...

I believe these are the applicable ranges:

11 Mbps - 150m
5.5 Mbps - 200m
2 Mbps - 250m
1 Mbps - 400m


 
Aratech said:
I believe these are the applicable ranges:

11 Mbps - 150m
5.5 Mbps - 200m
2 Mbps - 250m
1 Mbps - 400m
Click to expand...

Ranges published by manufacturers don't mean anything. There are an infinite number of things that can affect signal propagation. It is entirely possible to get a full 11mbps connection over many miles if you have good conditions. When I was wardriving around the SF bay area, I managed to pick up and communicate with an AP on Black Mountain from Marin county...
 
kleptophobiac said:
Ranges published by manufacturers don't mean anything. There are an infinite number of things that can affect signal propagation. It is entirely possible to get a full 11mbps connection over many miles if you have good conditions. When I was wardriving around the SF bay area, I managed to pick up and communicate with an AP on Black Mountain from Marin county...
Click to expand...

Soup can was getting me about 1.5 miles using 30mW :). It was pretty flakey, so I switched to a Transeo 200mW WiFi bridge, which is an outdoor off-white rectangle (build-in 15dbi gain antenna). Theoretically should be able to do 15 miles if conditions were perfect, 10 would be pushing it for good connectivity.

Enjoying 70-80Ms ping to google, connected to a DS3 backbone :D.
 
I think the coolest part of this whole diagram is the Amateur Radio part, but that is coming from another ham :p

What frequency are you operating in microwave? Or is that just a generic representation for UHF? Is the FT100 a QRP rig? I'm looking at maybe getting an FT-857d at some point...

Nice job, looks good
 
Your setup looks fine,the Optra is that a color laser? I have a older Optra R+ but don't have duplexing(but having a 14,000 page toner makes up for that),does your duplexing work fine? I'm going to evenually get a color laser printer with duplexing to replace my black & white laser printer.
 
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