I spend a fair amount of my time working in my home office. As such, I take the technology investments I make at home pretty seriously; not necessarily in terms of money, or features, or functionality, but in terms of reliability. If I need to count on something working, and it doesn’t, it can easily derail an entire morning or afternoon of productivity.

Battery Backup

The aging battery in the Back-UPS 280 on the left was no longer cutting it for keeping my network up and running when the power occasionally drops out at home. At minimum, I don’t want local network traffic or my hard drive backups over the network getting messed up if the power flickers. With the new unit on the right, I can at least get through a 10 minute outage with minimal impact.

Printers

My print volume at home is relatively low, but what would often happen using an old inkjet printer is that after several weeks of lack of use, to suddenly be expected to fire off 30 or 40 pages at a time would result in clogged print heads, dried ink, stuck gears, etc. Back in 2004, I picked up the LaserJet in the discard pile at CRA in Cambridge, MA, and used it successfully at home for a few years, then at a startup for a few years, until finally it sat idle after the startup closed down, one day hoping that I would find time to get it up and running at home.

Upgrading a 10+ year old inkjet for a 10+ year old laser? Odd, I know. That is, if you’ve never come across the marvelous workhorse that is the HP LaserJet 4M Plus. This thing just doesn’t quit. 281,000 pages printed and counting.

Now we can scratch “new color laser printer” off of the Christmas list, since between the Epson R300 inkjet for photos, and the LaserJet for the basics, we’re covered.

Degraded RAID Array

Our home file server for pictures and music has been running on a degraded RAID 1 configuration for some time now, thanks due to a failed SATA controller. I’ve had the new controller (only $13 on Newegg!) for some time now, but just needed to get it in there and restore the array.

Man, I do love software raid. This truly was as simple as:

1. Power off
2. Install RAID card
3. Hook up second drive
4. Power on
5. mdadm –manage -a /dev/md0 /dev/sdc

From there, it took a few hours to rebuild the array, but now all is well and protected in the event of a hard drive failure on our file server.

Upgrade the DVR wiring for Gigabit

We’re constantly moving large file around the home network, and 100Mbps Fast Ethernet to the DVR was becoming a noticeable factor. Everything supported Gigabit (even the switch in the basement attached to the server farm), except the old wiring. With that upgraded, it’s now Gigabit through and through. Score.

Wireless N for … Wireless N?

Ok, I know what you’re thinking. Either that I’m clueless, or that I’m swimming in enough money to swap out Wireless N routers willie-nillie (which, if you’re a reader of my wife’s blog, you know is not true).

For now, let’s just say that this is an initial foray into Zeroconf networking and Wide-area Bonjour with DynDNS.