Help with home network setup and backup solution

[Maffew]

Hi all,

I've just bought my first house (wooooo!) and it's a fixer upper (boooo!) We're getting it fully rewired and would like to take the opportunity to run some ethernet.
My fiance and I work from home and run a software development company.
We use the network a lot for sharing files between our machines but currently only backup to external hard drives.
We're getting quite a bit of work and it's becoming more and more apparent that we need to keep additional backups so would like to factor this into the network setup.
Although I'm quite tech savvy, I'm quite ashamed to say I've never used NAS drives or a Server and don't have much of a grasp on networking.
I would like to keep the networking hardware in the utility room at the back of the house.
The broadband currently enters at the front of the house.

Question 1: would it be better to run coaxial to the utility room or just have an additional network port in the living room?

Question 2: I have 2 machines that I use as a render farm, connected to the network and just use remote desktop if I need to make any changes. What size server cabinet would you recommend for 2 PCs and the additional networking hardware?

Question 3: With 2 rack mounted PCS would I need additional cooling?

Question 4: I intend to run 2 cat6 cables from the office to use for hdmi over ethernet. Would it be possible to have 2 ports in the front living room, 2 ports in the back room and choose which to route the hdmi to or would I have to physically swap cables each time I wanted to change it?

Question 5: I was looking at a NAS drive for backups. If I bought a microserver instead would this do as good and as reliable a job? Can I easily backup in a RAID?

Question 6: I would also like an offsite backup. Would this just be something as simple as a synology diskstation or similar at another location that I can use as a personal cloud?

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to read this, any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

 

[thenewoc]

Hi,

1. Run Ethernet from the front of the house, assuming that is the bt master socket. If you go for fibre broadband some involve openreach fitting a filtered faceplate over the bt master socket. This has connections on the rear for terminating the Ethernet so you can have a dsl socket in the utility room.

2. Are these machines in network rack mountable cases?

3. Not sure, I doubt it if they are internally properly cooled, cpu fan(s) and case fans? May be best to have pwm type fans inside these systems though so they can regulate their cooling to compensate for load and environment.

4. Put more Ethernet in than you think you'll need as it's the cheapest component. You should think of its installation like a wheel on a bike, spokes going out in all directions from a hub. The hub being the utility room. Here you'd typically have a patch panel where all of the beginning ends of the Ethernet runs are terminated. You can use the patch panel to connect a port from a room to the network switch or jumper a port from one room to another.

5. If you can have a PC at an alternative offsite location then Crashplan is worth a look as it's free to use on your own equipment, including external hard drives. Backs up changes to files so you can always go back to an earlier version of a file. Also allows you to create your own encryption key too. Bitbucket also worth a look as a free service for backup and version control of code and has private repositories.

 

[Maffew]

Wow! Thanks for the incredible reply!

The PC's aren't in rack cases at the moment but I intend to put them in some just to keep it tidy and all in one place.

Ive never heard of crashplan, that seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. Do you use it yourself? Would it be enough to just run a raspberry pi with drives connected at another site?

 

[Quartz]

Cable as much as you can. Put at least 2 points in every room and 4 points by the TV

A half-height rack is about domestic white goods height, but you need to consider how much noise you can tolerate. The louder the tolerable noise, the more tightly you can fit everything.

Your render boxes could probably be converted to 1U items. Your network switch will again be 1U. I expect you'll only need 1U or 2U for the patch panel.

How much storage you require determines the size of your server, though you could have a 1U server and a separate disk array.

Finally you should have a UPS which will be 4U.

So you have plenty of room in a half-height rack.

Since you're going to be rewiring, make sure you have a dedicated power circuit for the rack.

RAID is not a backup strategy but rather a data resilience strategy.

 

[nutcase]

Get a rack that can have a fan in the roof - then vent that to the outside world. I would imagine a "render farm" generates some heat?

 

[FerretBoy]

I'd be tempted to use AWS for your rendering, on demand spot instances might work out a lot cheaper than your own hardware if you don't run it all the time.. I'd still run multiple network cables though, I run all mine to the loft and have a switch and server there.

 

[fezster]

HP Microserver with xpenology is perfect as a NAS. I've setup mine with RAID5 using 3 x 4TB WD Red's, allowing me 8TB usable storage with redundancy. I also have an external hard drive connected via USB3 for daily backups.

As other have said, run multiple CAT5e/CAT6 cables to each room. This gives you some redundancy in case of failure, but also you'll find you'll need more ports than you envisage now. I'd run at least 2 to each room.

With regards to HDMI over ethernet. Most HDMI extenders work over two CAT5 cables. If you want to run to multiple destinations, you could use a splitter or switch at the source to allow this. You could also look at HDBaseT. It's more expensive, but runs over an existing network.

 

[Maffew]

Your render boxes could probably be converted to 1U items.

They both have fairly cumbersome CPU coolers and graphics cards. I was imagining having to use a 4U case. Is this just a matter of being efficient with space?

You could also look at HDBaseT. It's more expensive, but runs over an existing network.

I've read a little about HDBaseT but thought this was just a standard? Does it run over Cat6 then I'd use a different adapter over the Ethernet to HDMI?

Edit: Just had a read and it looks like you can carry UHD over a single cable

 

[thenewoc]

At the moment I just run the free version of crashplan but there are some differences with the subscription model, not least the sub model allows for continuous backup vs once per day on the free version. You can run the crashplan client on Windows, Mac or Linux so yes to the Raspberry Pi. I don't know what the cost of going down the Pi route would be though unless you already have the hardware or what the running costs would be in electricity over the year. If you go for the subscription model then also be aware that the home plans backup to US data centres. If you want your backups to go to European data centres then you need one of the business plans purchased through their UK certified partner Ceejay.

Another alternative if you want more bells and whistles which a self hosted solution would provide is to use something like Owncloud to manage your own cloud storage, this would consist of local HDD's and the option to also link other cloud storage services into it. Then use a compatible backup software that supports WebDAV such as Duplicati to send it's backups to your Owncloud service. So you'd keep a local copy of each backup and push a copy to your Owncloud system located on another site.

 

[Quartz]

They both have fairly cumbersome CPU coolers and graphics cards. I was imagining having to use a 4U case.

Ah, I had assumed they were just quad-CPU boxes. If you've got graphics cards and big coolers in there, then yes, you'll need a 4U case.