I started the tech work part of this weekend by rebuilding my server from scratch. When you have as many computers, as much data, and the size of music collection that we do, combined with the complexity of the network and the amount of devices connected, planning a network setup can be a real pain.
It used to be a simple solution setting up a home network, you had computers, you had a hub, and you had peer-to-peer workgroup networking. Now of course our design and set up could have been much simpler, but where is the fun in that? Now that I am pretty much finished, I am quite pleased with the results. Other than having to make some security policy changes to get OS X Tiger’s Samba implementation to talk to my Windows 2003 Server domain shares happily, I really had no problems getting things set up at all.
Our network is both wired and wireless. My main PC, the spare PC, Dawn’s PC and the server are all on a 16-port Netgear 10/100 network switch. We also have a wireless router spinning 802.11b/g networking throughout the house, WEP encrypted of course, as well as MAC address filtering for extra security…not bad.
On that wireless network there is usually some combination of between 2 and 5 laptops, a Nintendo Wii, a Playstation 3 and an Xbox 360. We also have Media Center computers in the kitchen and the game room that are on our wireless network as well. To finish the wireless networking off nicely I added a higher range antenna to give us a bit more distance.
As I had upgraded our server to Windows 2003 Server yesterday, today I extended it’s configuration from a simple File Server to an Application Server (IIS & FTP), a Domain Controller (Active Directory) and a local DNS Server. I also allowed Remote Desktop Connections for a select few AD Accounts.
I went into the wireless router configuration and set up some port forwarding for FTP and RDC on 21 and 3389 respectively and pointed them to our PDC.
Now what good is that on a dynamic address you might ask? I thought of that too! I went to www.no-ip.com and registered one of their dynamic DNS addresses. I then went into GoDaddy’s domain control panel, added a hostname to my domain and aliased it to the no-ip domain so I can easily connect to FTP and RDC with an easy to remember name and my Active Directory account credentials.
Now a file server on it’s own isn’t much fun, I wanted to do a little more with it, so I also enabled roaming profiles for my XP Pro machines in the house. My main PC, the spare PC and my XP Pro installation in Parallels on my MacBook Pro now all share the roaming profile configuration to keep me in sync with my stuff where I want, not to mention the profile and all my pertinent data being automatically backed up on the server on the mirrored share for extra security for my stuff.
Not a bad weekend’s work if you ask me. The only thing I have left to do is rebuild my Fedora Core Linux Server so my WAMPServer configuration on my main desktop isn’t my only web development environment. I have 4 parts PCs in the closet and I am sure one of them will be built of to fill that task shortly.
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