I have learned that most weather geeks are technology geeks as well… so from time to time I will get the geek meter cranking and share a few words from the world of tech…
SUMMER MAKEOVER: Most of you know I run very hard from September to May, during the school year, and have little time for fun tech projects (of course, weather is a ton of fun too). But, during the summer months, I do my best to catch up on my “tech to do” list. My two projects within the past few weeks… optimize my home network, and come up with a better storage/data backup plan. Boring for most, but a fun challenge for me.
NETWORK: I have all kinds of computers and doo-dads in the house that are on the network. A few off the top of my head:
My MacBook Pro
My wife’s iMac
Our son’s MacBook
Our son’s Wii and X-BOX 360
Slingbox
Apple TV
iPhones
Up until this week, I had a rather simple setup; an Airport Extreme wireless router in my office feeding everything. It works, but it could be better. You see, the problem is that some of these gizmos are equipped only with 802.11G wifi, not the higher speed 802.11N. If just one “G” client is using the network, the whole thing slows down to G speed. I really need the bigger “N” pipe for the Apple TV; big video files (movies, TV shows, etc) are pushed across the network from the iMac to the Apple TV (the Apple TV doesn’t have a large enough hard drive to store all of the media content).
The plan? Establish two segments within one wireless network. One for 802.11N devices, and the other for 802.11G.
I put the Airport Extreme router into 802.11N 5 GHz mode; only those devices will work with it. For the slower speed G devices, I attached an Airport Express router via ethernet cable to the Extreme, and put the Express into G/B mode at 2.4 GHz.
It works wonderfully. Transfer speeds are much faster for the Apple TV, and the G devices work great with the Airport Express serving them. For visitors to my house, they will see one wifi SSID “Spann N”, and another one called “Spann G”. While they are separate wireless networks, it is actually one big network and all computers and devices can see each other. Mission accomplished.
STORAGE: I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago; I am now using a Drobo for most of the storage needs here at home. The Drobo is a remarkable device, a version of a raid array that protects you from drive failure, and allows you to add storage on the fly. The version I am using has four bays, and I have a Western Digital 1 TB drive in each bay, for a total of 2.7 TB of available storage (the rest is used for redundancy). If a drive fails, just pop in a new one and you lose no data. And, if you need to increase the storage, just pop in a bigger drive in one of the bays. See more about the Drobo here. All of the external drives I were using were getting pretty unsightly in my office. This single black box looks great.
Initially I had the Drobo on the USB port on the Airport Extreme, but I get the idea I just had too many things going on for that to be a solution that offered enough speed for data transfer.
I now have the Drobo attached to the iMac with a firewire interface. All of our home media (movies, TV shows, music, pictures, etc) are stored on one partition, and can be accessed via the Apple TV (connected to the big screen TV in the basement), or any other computer on the network. The second partition is for data backup. The iMac uses the Drobo for a Time Machine backup, and I am using SuperDuper for backups for all other computers. SuperDuper allows for easy backups over a network drive, like the Drobo.
Of course, you need off-site storage as well, and I have a 1 TB drive at my office at ABC 33/40 for Time Machine backups for the MacBook Pro. I also have moved all of the various backups on the old external drives to the station in case of a catastrophe at home.
It is my belief that if you don’t have your data in two places, you don’t have it at all. Three places is even better. There is some very precious data (family things) on these drives, and I never want to lose it.
For some of you, I know it sounds like this boy has too many toys, but a large percentage of my time is spent producing digital content these days that requires all of this to be in place, and all of the radio work is done via digital audio files that are transferred to the various stations around the nation via the web. I don’t have time for equipment problems, network issues, or data loss. I am delighted with the performance and reliability of this setup, and I am ready to get back into the full grind here in a couple of weeks when school begins….
