Omega Cottage Occasional Blog

I have a new project. Up to now I have always use home networking equipment in my study and around my home. However I recently added an FTP server to the mix and found that I need to run it 24/7 to cope with the night owls among the people I work with. Until recently, I shut down everything before I went to bed so that there was no risk of fire or infection when I was away from the keyboard. So how was I going to adapt my network to remain safe and infection free while I try to sleep?

My network is made up of - 2 windows PCs, a Mac, a web server that I use for testing, a file server, 2 laptops and a media centre plus any 'visiting' PCs or laptops. To run this I was using a Netgear ADSL wireless router and a collection of Netgear switches and Wireless access points powered by three UPSs. This network like most networks had not been planned in any way - it just grew as I felt the need or acquired kit.

When I installed the FTP server I realised that I needed to power only part of the network 24/7 so I swapped the UPS round so that the Router and the FTP server were on one UPS and the rest of the network on the other two. Now I can leave the FTP server running but shut down everything else.

I still wasn't happy with this so I aquired a Netgear 24 port Gigabyte switch that is rack mountable. That got rid of the collection of small switches I was using which, although silent, got quite hot by the end of day. The 24 port switch is cold to the touch but noisy due to the 40mm fans that are used to cool it. This lead me on to think about a cabinet to hold the switch and my two servers.

At the moment my file server is a large old fashioned server case that has so many fans (12) that it has to be tucked away in another room. To take its place I have bought a rack mountable 2U server case that will hold 3 HDDs and fit with my FTP server and the Switch in a 6U data cabinet. The idea is that this cabinet can be powered via one of the UPSs and in the mains wiring run I will fit a thermal switch to cut off the power if the temperature rises above a fixed level. That should help to make the setup fire proof.

I haven't explored the world of business servers before so what will happen next will be very interesting, I hope. This weekend's task is to physically build the new server, install the software and commission it. Watch this space to see how I get on.