- Five MythTV backends, two of which are also frontends driving both our HDTVs, and two others using computer monitors to become a DVR-TV-ish system. In addition, there is a solo frontend-only system.
- A solo server serving half of my domains and housing my email system. The other half of the domains were dropped on one of the MythTV backends from above.
- A trickled-down computer serving as a UPnP media server to share content.
- Two desktops for me, and a mac for my wife. Both of my desktops had some filesharing setup and were required to remain on most of the time.
- A Windows MCE computer to compare with MythTV and interface with my X-Box 360.
What I wanted to do was group like functions together and add some functionality to the network. I wanted to clean up the mixing of workstations with file serving. In short, I wanted to "do things right" by applying everything I've learned over the last 7 years. The following are highlights of what I wanted to accomplish:
- Move all services to dedicated servers, in a cluster so that important services (especially Internet reachable ones) had high-availability.
- Consolidate file sharing to NAS/SAN devices, to free workstations.
- Harden my internet portal and gain new functionality with a full fledged network appliance.
- With the high availability, possibly volunteer some of my resources to things such as the public NTP pool.
- Set this up "right" before Father's Eve ends.
The details of what I used to achieve this are the purpose of this book.