Charles N Wyble blog

What have I gotten done so far in 2011?

1) Shipped a working mesh at the end of my previous engagement. This was a very exciting milestone for me, and closed out a multi year effort of on again/off again work on mesh networks.

2) Shipped several major milestones of my data ownership stack. This was an 18 month effort, that led me on a journey through infrastructure deployment and optimization, storage and server infrastructure assessment/evaluation/burn in, sustainability review. I went from a 2 rack deployment in my garage to running everything at my new $dayjob (large hosting provider) and a backup VPS at systeminplace. This took me from a month over month operations cost of $300 to about $70.00.

3) Relocated to Austin TX to work at one of the worlds largest shared hosting companies. This was quite an adventure and represented a huge improvement in my quality of life. I thoroughly enjoyed the last 8 months of contracting, which allowed me to detox from the horrible corporate environment in Los Angeles and find a perfect opportunity.

4) Finished up some major personal projects in my life, (mentoring someone and preparing them for a successful career in IT, putting my health/wellness as my number one priority, finding a deeply fulfilling place of work.

5) Completed several lingering data ownership tasks. My data ownership wiki page is now up to date with all the aspects that I’ve been working on for a couple of years on and off. From blogging/wiki/photos/accounting/centralized address book/project management functionality, to digital economy and security. It’s been a long journey but it’s finally complete!

6) Founded the FreeNetworkFoundation and found a way to fit my data ownership work into a milestone in the FNF roadmap/operations plan.

Been a very productive and enriching first half of the year!

So what’s ahead for the rest of 2011? 

1) Finish setup of physical infrastructure for home (development and very minimal production services) network, home security and  home entertainment services.

Status: 100% completed. New consolidated production system is ready for shipment to co-location center. All other gear is on standby for further configuration/deployment to other co-location centers. 

This set of tasks encompasses the physical setup of all hardware/services for home use. It includes tasks such as networked power distribution unit installation, network cabling, console hookup, optimizing gear layout across two racks , cable organization etc.

I’m moving production related services to a co location box. Moving off my $dayjob VPS to a dedicated server for about the same monthly price.

I’ll be running the first FreedomTower off my home network.

Detailed break down:

• Pull everything off of production rack and re rack gear (necessary to clear space for build out of consolidated server) << done
• Consolidate drives/ram/peripherals to FreedomLink system (server consolidation. good stuff) << done
• Optimize gear distribution/layout on production rack << done
• Optimize air flow on all gear << done

Re-rack all gear:

2 post rack (FreedomTower rack):

• Install PDU for later use << done
• Connect all network gear to Cisco terminal server << done
• Make cables beautiful << done
• Label all gear << done

AV rack (production rack):

• Install PDU for later use << done
• Install, power up, configure 3650 distribution layer switch and 2950 access layer switch << done (overkill for a home network? perhaps. however I do plan to run a small production wireless ISP and so need a bit of infrastructure to support that.)
• Connect all network gear to console << done
• Connect all gear to network << done
• Set up gear for mesh link between two parts of apartment complex (installing gear on both ends of link,  running power/networking cabling) << done
• Setup security cameras << done
• Make cables beautiful << done

2) Base configuration of network gear, home network services, research/development/production servers.

Status: 100% completed

This set of tasks encompasses all of the basic network/server/support infrastructure configuration tasks for my development/research and home services network to be usable.

At this time, all of my gear is on the network (via wired or wireless connection) and reachable for management purposes. I have a dedicated management network (10.10.6.0/24) for all gear. Now that all the physical gear is setup, it needs to have foundational setup completed.  On the server side, this means running a virtual machine farm, on the network side this means multiple VLANs for all my future projects.

Detailed break down:

A) Physical infrastructure related tasks:

• Optimize power usage of all systems << done (via cpufreq on Linux. Hardware I’m running pfSense on has some stability issues with powerd)
• Setup ZoneMinder for home security << done (camera hooked up, video capture card working, feed into zoneminder working.).

• Setup ipv6 on pfsense << done
• Setup all virtual lans in pfsense (interface define/assign/label, subnet) << done (research operations will be done on home network. As such I need decent amount of infrastructure (software/server side) to support those projects.

• Migrate personal e-mail archive collection into online memex (i have a few hundred e-mails to take public). I need to up on the net so others can benefit from them. They are already nicely categorized. This collection will feed into the FNF roadmap. It represents several years of collected knowledge about large scale network operations.
• Write blog post on fitness “Culture Shock: from free soda to free gym, how I have built the life I want”. This will cover past status, present status and future plan. Might have to start a fitness blog or something. At least a web page to track progress. << health is my top priority in 2011. It’s why I contracted for several months and waited for the right opportunity to come along which let me live a healthy and balanced life. I want to share what I did and how I did it so others can benefit. Post started and well underway
• Setup security research/testing lab