Sometimes a bodge can pay off big-time. The ridiculous pricing of B&Q for wood saved my servers down in the cellar from the last round of flooding. I built the "frame" out of proper wood. It was a rush job at the time else I'd have gone to a timber merchant. Fortunate I didn't. I baulked at B&Q prices for anything horizontal. Hmm, wooden decking end of line pieces on offer: that'll do me. Consequently when the water came flooding in through the old coal chute, it flowed through the decking onto the floor, rather than along the bottom of each server. I didn't even notice, even after some time away, until I lost contact with a hypervisor. Oh, things have been floating about around down here.Until last summer a Pi Zero here served as a VPN gateway and firewall. I wrapped it in a bit of a milk carton for a case and simultaneously powered and networked it through a USB cable connected to a PC. In addition to secure hardware isolation, the low cost low power low performance of the Zero prevents saturating the low bandwidth residential connection. That avoided complaints from others directly connected to the router.My firewall of ages is an original rpi sporting a 100Mb ethernet dongle. It manages to chuck enough data in/out via iptables so we can both game at the same time without issues. This is because regardless of what our ISP advertises, we never get 100Mbit.
Shifting homes led to a fiber connection. Now an x86 mini PC with four built-in Ethernet ports runs the VPN and firewall. In most regards functionality is the same; however, the x86 doesn't depend on another system for its power. Also traffic shaping that was an automatic result of the Zero isn't as necessary for the fiber connection.
All hail milk cartons and decking!
Statistics: Posted by swampdog — Fri Nov 22, 2024 8:30 pm