Gulker labs latest: the ‘cheesy crate’
Posted on December 29, 2006
Filed Under All, Photos, Technology, Gulker labs |
Honest, I have been thinking for a long time about upgrading the LAN, making the gulker.com World HQ experience richer and easier to use and generally cleaning up the whole thing. I’m used to working against technology, defaulting to bad work flows because of a system glitch and otherwise working around things that should be working for me.
So, my resolution for 2007 is to make World HQ work for me (and Linda) a lot better than in the past. It should be easy to find things, it should be easy to do things, and everything a computer does well should be off my hands and delegated to its CPUs, registers and memory.
The starting point for me is the physical state of World HQ’s LAN and other systems accomodations. Years of adding and pulling computers, servers, experimental clusters, cam, scanners, HDTV demultiplexers et al. have left a pretty sorry mess that makes it really hard to change things. For one thing, every socket and power strip here is full, though many of the bricks’ wires lead to peripherals long gone.
We needed a fix: so one of the things I’ve done during radiation therapy, MRIs and othe time when thought-exercises were about all else I could do, was to think about how to fix things, and not just by tearing everything out and starting over again (which has been done a couple times now). Then, once I had a plan, I begun to try to deconstruct it to the fewest pieces that would be easy to manage, so that changing things going forward would also be easy.
Today we did the first protoype, code-named ‘cheesy crate’ after the $8 office-supply plastic file crate that is now the substrate, kind of like the telco racks in a server room, for the left side of gulker.com’s compute environment, presented here in before and after pix. A write-up, pictures-in-progress et al. are in the works…
Comments
6 Responses to “Gulker labs latest: the ‘cheesy crate’”
Leave a Reply
[…] It has been this cruft that drove me, through many cumulative hours, largely immobile, in MRI machines, MSI ‘cones’ and strapped under a linear accelerator, to image how I might both improve the usability of World HQ (HW and SW aside) and then how to attack the cruft to get it done. After an initial success (the ‘Cheesy Crate‘) the cruft has made a strong comeback, slowing things to a re-do crawl on the right-hand side (and oldest) part of the LAN. Long day spent mano-to-mano with aging, unmarked Cat-5, power bricks from/to nowhere, real dust bunnies and more… […]
[…] In any case, the moment came to unpack the 2 bags of stuff I bought at Fry’s last weekend, lined up next to reusable existing components as seen above. Rememebering our ’simplify, de-construct’ philosophy that resulted in the successful Cheesy Crate design, our first choice was the config seen in the small photo to the left. A newer NetGear firewall mated with an 8 port Gigabit switch would be the core, attached to the Comcast cable modem mounted just under the shelf. […]
[…] Next up will be integrating our AMD 64-bit box back into the mix. I think there’s a way to squeeze it into the ‘cheesy crate‘ that organizes the left side of World HQ. There’s an open port on the KVM, so we’ll be able to wire it in nicely if we can get it tucked into a new home. […]
[…] We did get the AMD 64-bit machine tucked in to the cheesy crate as planned, and have decided that Fedora Core 7 - at $9.95 from Linuxcentral.com - is a better OS choice than Vista, which comes in at a minimum of $215. Vista will probably have more drivers for cams et al., but I’m guessing I can get Fedora to work with everything I care about, and anyway, I’m mainly loooking to connect to Google online resources - Docs, Apps, Calendar, Picassaweb and my new experiment, a Micro-Stock photo site (Gulker Labs redux) built with Lightroom and Google Apps. […]
[…] Water is already in short supply in many parts of the world, and climate change has the potential to disrupt it even more, affecting large populations. I captured some of my thoughts about same in a not-quite 3-minute podcast, the first produced with the lashed together analog World HQ home audio studio (seen above). We need to find a way to keep the audio pieces hooked up for more rapid set up… maybe a new cheesy crate…? […]
[…] The only thing lacking is a housing for the drives (though Newertech has a product Mac Mini aficionados will like): full-on geeks won’t mind, and those who favor solutions like my cheesy crate won’t either. Good item to keep in your geek drawer … […]