Why didn’t anyone tell me…

Apparently it’s time to start in on the project, as my Linksys router is melting. Getting any decent load on the router causes it to reset. This is especially problematic because it is the central switch in the network. That backup you were doing? Not so much. I borrowed a switch from the basement storage servers and put the wireless router on as a bump-0n-the-log, so it can reset all it wants so long as I’m doing my backup on the wired connection.

First recovery step was to set up a m0n0wall VM as a wired router. This is working surprisingly well so long as I don’t try to update anything (keep snapshots!). Adding the Apple USB to Ethernet adapter was seamless. In the host I disabled it entirely, and set it up bridged to the m0n0wall VM. Connect it bridged to the m0n0wall VM and connect that directly to the DSL modem and everything comes up perfectly.

After some contemplation of physical demands and so on, I came up with two models – unified and distributed. Unfortunately, I need 4 switches to physically connect all the bits of my house I plan to use; I just can’t get around that. Because of this, I don’t have much motivation to pick up one of those $200 plus big switches and connect every port in the house (dang). But here’s what it would look like now if I were to pick up one big multiport switch to finish the current implementation:

And here’s what it will probably look like after the meltdown is over:

(Don’t take the diagrams too seriously, some things are just empty slots that are reserved for moving things around. I didn’t want to spend any more time dinking around with it. )

The essentials being that instead of having two nodes with most of the hardware, I spread it around a bit. The net savings in hardware being $100-200 difference in the primary switch in the wiring closet. If they had finished the wiring in my house properly, I could likely reduce this to the single switch in the wiring cabinet. But without doing physical rewiring in the house I can just do this by replacing a single gigabit switch ($40-80) and picking up a wifi-N access point (which I did today, $120 Netgear).

I did toy with setting up VLAN support on the network, but having to replace ALL the switches to move the router and servers to the basement was just too expensive for home implementation. If  I was buying all new, I’d gladly pay the $20 premium per-switch to do it.

I will also point out that this marks the beginning of my infrastructure virtualization project, as the m0n0wall VM not only works, but appears speed up “normal web access” compared to my Linksys 330N. Three cheers for the m0n0wall folks.

I should write up another post detailing why I didn’t use the gateway built into OS X Server, which is a bummer.