Post your battlestations! Calling all nerds!

[Savva]

I wish I could post my setup here, but I have an xbox. My older brother has some nice rig though.
Very nice lighting Andy! Good work on those displays too. I also liked Ipkiss

[pberggren1]

I hope you are doing well Savva. We have not seen you on for a while.

[Savva]

I hope you are doing well Savva. We have not seen you on for a while.

Hey Phil, nice to meet you. I am doing great. Have a good day.

[pberggren1]

Good to hear Savva. I hope you also have a good day.

[Savva]

I looked up my gmail archives and found these quite old pics of my brother's system.
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/809/gb4h.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/850/jjuc.jpg/
They were made in early stages of compiling, unfortunately no lighting, no room is shown. Of course now it is a little different . My brother just hearts these things, he is into programming and many other computer stuff I don't know about . We both like to play computer more, than xbox of course, but now he is teasing me with gta v pics on xbox, cos he's got a chance to play it day one. Btw, I am studying for winter semester in Prague right now, so I am away from home.

[pberggren1]

My brother in law has a few of those cars that are on the desk top.

[SpaceflightAddict]

Andy, what are those 2 black box units sitting on the shelving unit to the right?

Those are two old decently specced desktop computers I am using as servers, below that is a very large HP server with a 6 drive hot swap SCSI RAID array. In another room, on a different electric circuit, I have 4 more servers, and intend to keep increasing that number.

I am building my own cloud cluster, so the more the merrier.

[pberggren1]

Yikes!!! What do you use all those servers for?

[annekat]

Jeez, you guys, I barely even know what a server is...... and didn't know it was something one would set up in one's home. I am definitely not a geek or a nerd, and am probably not going to become one anytime soon. And I don't mean that NOT being a geek or nerd is a good thing! I admire geeks and nerds.

[SpaceflightAddict]

I looked up my gmail archives and found these quite old pics of my brother's system.
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting
They were made in early stages of compiling, unfortunately no lighting, no room is shown. Of course now it is a little different . My brother just hearts these things, he is into programming and many other computer stuff I don't know about . We both like to play computer more, than xbox of course, but now he is teasing me with gta v pics on xbox, cos he's got a chance to play it day one. Btw, I am studying for winter semester in Prague right now, so I am away from home.

I LOVE that desk. So clean. So sleek. I really hate showing wires, but by the time I get to the point to hide them, I am ready to get back to work on the computers themselves. This time will be different though. I WILL hide all of the wires.

The under shelf lighting was the biggest pain. I had to solder lots of sections of wire in to get the LED strips in each nook. I did suceed in hiding all of those wires thankfully, but it was a significant project to do the shelf lighting right. The result speaks for itself however.

Yikes!!! What do you use all those servers for?

Right now I have Gluster (Gluster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) running on the cluster for ultimate data reliability, and ownCloud (ownCloud.org | Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way!) for google like cloud services.

While all of my data is safe, even if a couple of nodes drop out, the services running on any particular node will be lost.

My goal is to get to the point that if a node fails, whatever was running on it seamlessly continues on the remaining nodes. That is quite a bit more complicated to accomplish, but I have a very good IT professional friend who is working hard on it.

There are two significant problems that remain however.

Electricity is the most ovbious.... I do not have enough UPSes and every used one I have got has been DOA. I also do not have a backup generator. This means that when the power goes out, bye bye cloud until it comes back on.

The second problem is bandwidth. I live in a residential suburban area, which limits my ISP options. It is Comcast or bust around here, and 50mbps down 10mbps up is the best they can do for me. I checked out getting a real fiber optic line run to my home, and surprisingly the monthly rates for a very speedy connection are reasonable. The problem is running the fiber out to my house; they are more than happy to do it, but it is very very very expensive to do. Verizon FiOS has not reached my area yet, so I can't even go for channel bonding (Channel bonding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Comcast is the only game in town, so if they go down, my cloud goes down.

I have lofty goals, but ive got time to overcome these issues. Basically I want to create my own google, and have it be just as reliable, and do it cheap as dirt. I just go around asking people I know for their old computers.

It is a very fun project for me.