Personal Network Project - Skynet
Project scope
Although this project was strictly personal, it took months of work necessitating some initial requirements being set:
- Share my love for Sci-Fi movies with a futuristic "Terminator" themed network.
- Add new cable TV connections to each room in house.
- Install new telephone runs upgrading damaged original wiring to to Cat5e.
- Run new Cat5e Ethernet connections to each room.
- Install network, video, and telecommunications equipment .
- Configure server to provide local network storage, print shares, domain services, web, email, ftp, and remote network management services.
Background
After completing my first computer and simple wireless network configuration before my teenage years, the interest in pushing my technological limits truly set in. To honor my love for Sci-Fi and the Terminator movie series, the network, equipment, and all of its associated services have been named after memorable events throughout the series, thus the network name, Skynet, was born. In its early iteration, Skynet operated off of a base model WRT-54G wireless broadband router running DD-WRT and a previously retired Dell OptiPlex GX1 desktop system. This setup was considerably crude, but offered a small amount of network storage, printer shares, and domain services. This system remarkably remained operational for approximately 5 years, running 24/7 after undergoing several minor hardware upgrades. It finally gave up all life after an impressive 90 thousand hours of run time between my ownership and its previous life!
At this point, my original custom built computer was obsolete and retired as I completed my second build. I purchased a new computer chassis and redesigned the original build to use more energy efficient and reliable parts. This new system acted as the brains of Skynet, remaining operational for an additional 5 years before succumbing to the all too familiar leaking capacitor issue that plagued the early 2000's.
Upon moving into an older house with no cable connections, telephone limited to the living room and master bedroom, and poor wireless reception, I took it upon myself to rewire the entire data system in the house. Using a Leviton Structured Media System, I ran new wiring in the walls and terminated cable, VoIP, and Ethernet connections in every room of the house (except closets and bathrooms, obviously!). This allowed for not only wireless network access, but high speed Ethernet hookups to ease load on the wireless devices.
Today:
Although we are no longer in the house wired with the high speed infrastructure, it will be installed here too! I am currently working to rewire the new house with Cat6 cabling for phone and data in addition to the traditional Coaxial wiring. Also, due to the layout of the property, each floor will be wired with Power over Ethernet Wireless Access Points. In addition, I built a brand new server to replace the last with failed capacitors. This one features 8 gigabytes of memory and an Intel Core i3 processor to support the software requirements. In addition, to allow the redundant storage of a large amount of media and other data, there are 4 hot swappable server hard drives running in RAID 5 to allow a total of 8 Terabytes of usable space. This server runs domain services, file and printer sharing, remote management and network monitoring, power monitoring, and a fully operational Apache web server with email and a dropbox-style online file access system.
The gallery at the bottom of the page shows the original Leviton network I created, and the new server I built. More pictures will come as the network is completed in the coming year; Enjoy!
Useful Links:
Click here to view the Skynet home page.
Click here to view the Skynet Service Status page.
Click here to return to this portfolio's home page. (This site is also hosted on the server pictured below!)
