SysAdmin Saturday: potential future upgrades and network changes

It’s “System Administration Saturday”, which is my new informal term for all the maintenance and hijinks required to maintain a stable home network and computing environment each week. I have a significantly overcomplicated LAN, but it’s necessary to maintain the concept of “access from anywhere” that I enjoy being able to use.

Along with the usual maintenance required during the week, one of the things I figure I should do is maintain a real-life changelog of what goes on so that I know what might’ve recently been changed. Today’s can be summarized as:

  • Enabled the jumbo frame setting on bender and monolith with a payload size of 9000 bytes. I’m still only seeing spikes of 20% usage on the gigabit Ethernet adapter from bender, but file transfers across the switch are slightly improved in speed.
  • Attempted another fix to the WRT54G v8’s port forwarding configuration to resolve FTP passive mode issues. No word on whether this has worked yet; if not, I’d be willing to bet there’s something odd with FileZilla Server requiring a reinstallation.
  • Resynchronized the bender dropbox and downloads folders to monolith. monolith‘s disk space is sitting at 475GB free of 1.71TB total. There’s room in the box for one more internal SATA drive and one eSATA unit, but I’d need a new, reliable enclosure to put an eSATA disk into production.

Along with these changes, I’ve compiled a list of several potential new upgrades that would be “nice to have” items whenever I get a bit of spare cash:

Item Timeframe/Rationale
Additional 500GB SATA2 drive When space in server is below 200GB free
5-port gigabit Ethernet switch One month; improve HD video streaming performance
24″ + widescreen monitor Eventually or when 21″ CRT dies
Download server replacement: needs PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet End of year; will likely be repurposed media center PC

Edit: Fixed table formatting to be less… wide.

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