Networky Stuff

This sounds completely unrelated to anything networking but hang on in there…

Sadly at the end of last week one of our neighbours was broken into and had his plasma telly stolen by some thieving scumbags. We discovered later that this was one of many ‘plasma breaks’ that have been happening in our area by a very organised group of criminals.

Our neighbour when he found out he had been burgled was only really worried about the data on his PC or the backups of it. We are exactly the same, although we don’t necessarily do the backups as regularly as we should.

The burglary has prompted us to sort it out as we would be really pissed off if we lost all our photos/music/emails so we’ve gone and bought some network storage. A lovely little black box we can hide in the house and only needs a network connection and power to it. For those of you that care it is a Thecus N2100, with a pair of Western Digital Raid Edition 320GB drives in a RAID 1 configuration. We are planning to find a cosy little home for it hidden away in a corner of the house and if the PCs get stolen so be it. The hardware can be replaced easily enough.

Setup of the box was not quite as easy as it should have been, changing to the latest firmware (currently 2.0.0) helped, and having disks that are tested and certified to work with it helped. Not sure on the network performance of it yet, I’ll be upgrading to gigabit at some point as it supports that.

I have been messing around with running a Windows 2003 Server box but it just runs too slowly on the old hardware I have spare. Instead that is going to become a games server.