I have been playing with a Sanguino development board this weekend. It is a pretty nice chip, a big brother of the popular arduino but with more I/O's and more memory etc. I plan on building an extensive project with it in the coming weeks and months. Here is a quick video of it in action with a test program I wrote.

After skiing all weekend at Jay Peak in Vermont I am back home. Unfortunatlly, it rained as soon as we got there and distroyed all of the good snow. Today of course they are getting tons of fresh powder. I took a bunch of pictures with my Canon XSi and a polorizing filter. Many of them came out quite nice. I setup on a nice spot on the top of a jump and took photos of a few kids hitting 360s all day. Here is the link to Flickr where you can see those photos.

I have been quite busy lately with work and what not. I am now programing iPhone apps at work for doctors to use with patients. I have made a few batches of beer. Built a few fun circuits. And done a bit of skiing. My server closet is complete, wired and working. More pictures of that may be up soon. I also picked up a new DSLR. A Canon Rebel XSi 12MP and a few accessories. You can find some of my projects on instructables.com and some of my pictures on flickr, just look for "pcmofo" at either site.

I have been using my FreeNAS based NAS server for over a month now. It is rock solid and super easy to setup. I waited for a sale on Segate 750GB hard drives and when it came around I picked up 4 of them and then some barebones computer parts from NewEgg. $360 for the hard drives and about $200 for the computer parts for a grand total of $560.

Here is the barebones computer running an AMD 3400+ processor and a gig of ram. I will most likely upgrade it in the future but for now its fine as FreeNAS has a low overhead.


Here is the 4x 750GB hard drives


The drives installed in the computer and wired up.


The BIOS screen showing all 4 of the hard drives + the OS drive and CD drive.


Here is me accessing the NAS over the network from my Mac.


MMMM almost 2TB of formatted RAID5 storage. It works great over the CAT6 Gigibit ethernet and over the Airport N Wi-Fi.

I have finally finished my server closet. It took a while to get the wires run all over the house because our house has all plaster walls which makes it impossible to run wires through the walls easily. I was able to run most of the wires through a cold air return duct and a gap between the chimney that is used for the furnace and the wall which allowed me to run wires from the basement to the top floor easily. All the wires are CAT6. Lets get started with some pictures!

Here is the sketch up model of my closet


Closet after the plaster and shelves were installed


Here are some of the CAT6 wires run. Different colored booties help tell them apart. These are just a few of many to come.


These are 2 of the 3 UPS's that will help keep the servers and network up in the case of a brown out or loss of power for a few minutes.


Here is a few of the servers, a 8 port switch and the FreeBSD router/firewall. The servers from left to right are, a test firewall that has now been removed, a windows box to do windows things, and a LAMP box to act as a test server for home use.


Here is a close up of the shelf bracket with the shelf removed.


I picked up some brackets to act as cable guides and mounted them to the bottom.


Here is the shelf back in position.


On the left is a 16 port Gigibit Switch. On the right is the FreeBSD based firewall/router.


Some of the cables plugged into the network gear.


Underneath you can see the routing of the wires.


Here is the network up and running.


That is the state of the server closet of the last time I took pictures. I have replaced a server since then and added a few more lan connections. Some more pictures will be up soon.

12 years ago when we moved into our house we finished off the basement into an entertainment center. A few years later I moved into the basement along with the 53" TV and couch etc. I share my room with the laundry room and hot water heater/furnace next door. Those areas have so far remained unfinished. We finally got around to installing a new furnace and central air. Now we are finishing off the rest of the basement by adding a bathroom where the unfinished laundry room currently is.

Two small closets were built in my room to enclose the gas and water meters from view. Those are currently being borded up with dry wall as they have also remained unfinished. With the help of a friend I was able to run cat 6 around my house to the various computers around my house. All of the wires are centrally run to one of these closets. As soon as the drywall is done I will be installing a few servers and all of my network hardware with a few UPS's. This should keep the noise to a minimum and save me some space as well. I will post some pictures later of the progress and the finished results.

Here is the list of devices to go in the "server closet" so far.

My previous PC, a P4 with 2.5GB ram running XP to serve as a Bittorrent auto downloader via RSS and accessiable via a web interface from anywhere.
An old Dell PC from back when they used RD-Ram. It is running as an Ubuntu LAMP server and will be used as a test bed for my web sites
A really old Dell PC that will be used as a testing box for freeBSD builds for firewalls/NAS servers
A ALIX2c3 embeded board (amd geode 500Mhz 256MB 1GB flash drive) running PFSense, a freeBSD baised firewall/router/VPN software
A D-Link green 8-port Gigibit router (which quickly ran out of ports and may need to be upgraded to 16 ports)
3 APC UPS's will help to keep the network up as well as some of the more important computer systems.
Still to be built/bought is a 2TB+ RAID5 NAS server. As soon as I figure out what hardware I am using and get the rest of the network/servers up this will go up.
Stick around for pictures of the build progress/updates.