For this week’s entry, one of our options was to discuss our at-home network configuration. As our home network is rather interesting, I couldn’t resist picking this one.
Until recently, we were using Comcast for internet connectivity. However, as fiber-optic cables were recently put down in our neighborhood, we have switched to Verizon FiOS. We switched for a couple reasons: firstly, Comcast’s customer service was pretty terrible, and secondly, the FiOS download and upload speeds are many times faster than Comcast’s. Our Comcast connection averaged about 6 mbps download and 1.5mbps upload, while FiOS could reach speeds of 19mbps downloading and 5mbps uploading, respectively. I highly recommend it so far.
To access the FiOS service, Verizon installs an optical network terminal on the exterior of the house and runs a coax cable to the router they supply. Most users would probably be fine with this router alone, but as we already had a complicated networking setup, my husband followed these instructions to bridge the coax to an ethernet port and a different router. We use this router, Linksys WRT54GL that is running Tomato, as our primary router and firewall, as Tomato is much more configurable firmware than the standard. With Tomato, we are also able to use OpenVPN to access our network when we are elsewhere. The router also implements Quality of Service (QoS) rules to allocate bandwidth according to usage– this prioritizes certain network activities over others.
My husband and I each have a laptop and a desktop, and in addition to that, the XBox360 and a headless Linux server are also connected in. The PCs, the server, and my husband’s laptop are connected directly to the router with cat5 cables, my laptop runs off wireless, and XBox runs off an additional router that acts as a wireless bridge. XBox’s wireless adapters are far more expensive than a Linksys router, so we decided to use that instead for reasons of pure frugality.
All of the computers run on Windows XP, although differing versions: two use Professional, one uses Home, and my laptop came with Media Center. The server is my husband’s pet project, and runs off Ubuntu, using Samba to integrate with Windows networking. It serves many functions: it acts as primary storage on the network(with a 1TB hard drive), an FTP server, a Ventrilo server (a voice chatting program for use primarily during online games), an XBox media server, allowing us to stream video to the XBox to watch on our TV, and as a Squid proxy, which cuts bandwidth usage during web browsing by caching oft-visited websites.
This all sounds terribly complicated, and it is, frankly, but it all works very well.
That is a more advanced setup than I’ve seen at some companies! Good show. I notice you mention Samba. What an excellent product. I’ve used it for many, many years now and have integrated it into active directory. Back when Windows systems were just starting to support long file names, my Samba shares were doing it with ease. It’s remarkable how well it software works for as little care and feeding it needs. Microsoft has a product that tries to compete with it, but most of the people I’ve talked to like Samba better.
I really like FiOs internet as it is a lot faster than Comcast and so much more reliable. My parent’s have Comcast and everytime I use their computer I try talking my mom into getting FiOs. Comcast loses internet service almost weekly, which causes my parents to either call me or my brother-in-law over to try to fix–to no avail since Comcast is so widespread and commercially operated that it cannot be fixed manually. On the other hand, I split FiOs service with my neighbor and I have almost never had any problem connecting to it. It is so fast and provides a lot better customer service (for when it does rarely have problems. I would definitely suggest FiOs over other services!