Stochastic Ideations

I'm writing this mostly so I can refer to it from other postings. It's not all that interesting in itself.

Hardware and Software

We're a mostly BSD and Mac shop here at home. Kirk and I each have a BSD box (he runs PC-BSD, I run FreeBSD) that are at least theoretically our "main machines". I say theoretically because over the years I find that I do most of my keyboard and mouse interaction with Macs. None the less, my FreeBSD box remains my primary file and email server, and is where I do most of my programming. I also have a Linux box for testing and some work for/with third parties. Kirk and I each have a Mac laptop and I also have a Mac Mini. Our web/DNS server is a Soekris 5501, a very sweet box indeed, especially since it draws minimal power. Our tenant also has a couple of Linux machines on the net. I occasionally run Windows 7 in a virtual machine on my Mini, usually only when I'm doing my finances.

The theme over the last couple of years has been minimizing power consumption, especially since we had solar installed with time-of-day metering. Having the biggest baddest machine isn't as interesting to me now than it used to be.

Networking

Although overkill, we have four networks here: a WAN connection (of course), a LAN that contains most of the main machines, a DMZ for the publicly exposed servers, and a net dedicated to WiFi. It's probably overkill, but hey.

These are all connected together with a Soekris 4801 running m0n0wall. I've been very happy with it.

Our ISP is Sonic.net (Fusion service). They aren't perfect, but as the tee shirt at ISPcon said, "my ISP sucks less". They don't have native IPv6 support yet, but they do have a 6in4 gateway. More about Sonic here and in a later post.

Telephony

Although not strictly "computing", we do have a Panasonic KX-TD1232 phone switch. We don't have a house so large that we really need multiple extensions, but we do have five (yes, five) phone lines coming in, and it has proven to be very useful. What can I say, I have a phone fetish. I may post about that in the future.