Unplugged. Rewired. Upgraded.

Where have the past five days gone? Sorry for disappearing (I feel like I say this every week) but between a business trip and our first major house project being in progress, we’ve been somewhat unplugged over here.

We’ve slowly started having the electrical redone throughout the house. Going into the purchase of an old house, we knew we would have to do some, but the extent of how much totally took us by surprise. Our wiring needed lots of clean-up, redo and then some all-new to suit our techie lifestyle. It’s still in progress, but already the lack of cords and cleaner box has been a huge weight off our shoulders.

Doing this project has also enabled us to expand some infrastructure for our business. We now have cat6 running through our loft, living room, media room and into the basement. Doing so allows us to finally build the server box of our dreams.

We’re building it in a little room in our basement we’re just now showing you for the first time. Sorry, but you really weren’t missing much. We lovingly call it the “boo box” (Hook reference). It’s a windowless room that houses one of our sump pumps and our reverse-osmosis water filter. We’ve also been using it for some backpacking and racing equipment storage. Exciting stuff.

Here are some pics of our build in progress:

With the rack and cat6 wiring in place, we can now focus on building our network and server environment for our business. The server will handle many functions however the most important will be data backups and redundancy. It will also serve as a test web server, FTP server, cloud storage server, and our media center/streaming server for movies and shows to our TV. We will also be putting in a PoE (Power over Ethernet) switch into the rack allowing us to connect powered devices like surveillance cameras without needing to run a power cable. Battery backups will also be included so that in the event of a power failure we can bring our devices down gracefully and not risk data loss. Having our home wired will also allow our devices to run at 1 gigabit per second speeds ensuring plenty of bandwidth for the large amounts of data we handle. In our business even the fastest wireless just does not cut it.

You might be asking yourself, “what is this all for?” “Why do you need this?” Well, because the nature of our business involves a lot of irreplaceable and valuable data that if we ever lost, not only would we have a lot of pissed off clients, but we would never recover it all which is a really, really scary proposition. So we need a way to back it all up and ensure its safety. Having this server will give us a more professional solution to our data safety and redundancy. Exciting right?

Having this first project under our belts has given us a huge surge of motivation to keep the momentum going. We hope to tackle some smaller projects while we rebuild our savings, but with each step, no matter the size, this house feels a little more like ours.