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Nephil Thief

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Because I needed to start a happier, less controversial topic...

 

What does your home network look like?

 

Mine is as follows...

 

doomguard (gateway/firewall)

I give the "doomguard" designation to the current firewall machine. Right now it's a headless Acer Aspire 3680 - headless because the screen was damaged a few years back. It runs IPFire (x86/PAE).

 

flying-dutchman (laptop)

A Compaq C700 laptop, running OpenSUSE 13.2 (x64) on a 120 GB SSD. I'm still not sure if the SSD was worthwhile, though it at least makes running KDE feasible. :p

 

harvest-lore (workstation)

Custom AMD A4 workstation with 8 GB of RAM, also running OpenSUSE 13.2 x64. This is what I use for work and freelancing, experimentation of all sorts, and any VM hosting (it's the only machine in the house with hardware virtualization support).

 

sulfras (test backup server)

This is actually an Eee 1005HAB netbook, formerly known as grayarea; I'm using it to test some network backup software (currently BackupPC). This is working quite well, even with wimpy hardware.

 

thistledown (old desktop)

An archaic Powerspec 1405, single-core desktop with 1 GB of RAM and no SATA support. It still provides an okay desktop experience, with Xfce or Mate, especially if you use Linux software RAID. But I'm mainly thinking of making it the "production" backup server for the whole network; with the help of a PCI SATA controller, and some large hard drives. At that point I will probably rechristen it as time-hound.

 

defiant (laptop)

The only laptop that I have a Windows 7 license for. It's a ~2007 issue HP laptop, largely identical to flying-dutchman, but without the SSD. I barely ever use it.

 

There's also another Linux desktop, vesuvius; and a couple of nameless Windows 7 PCs.

...

 

Oh, trivia:

* doomguard was originally a gift from my parents for college, before I went off to UMass.

* flying-dutchman and defiant were from friends who had upgraded.

* I bought sulfras a week into my first job. Not exactly money well spent...

* harvest-lore was a cheap kit from Newegg. It replaces the original, a used dual-core Dell workstation, which had suffered a spontaneous motherboard failure.

* thistledown was bought in ~2004 to replace the original, a Powerspec 1420 destroyed by a close lightning strike.

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My mother has a Mac laptop, and is going to buy a desktop computer soon. Hopefully not another Mac.

 

My father has 3 Toshiba laptops. One is for work.

 

I have a Gateway laptop, a Kindle Fire, an old Dell laptop with a broken screen, two Raspberry Pi 'computers', and my current HP desktop PC. I despise them all equally.

 

The only one I know that has a unique name other than "<Owner>'s <device>" is my current desktop PC. Lovingly named RustyBucket by me. It's important because I use it for gaming.

 

Here some old specs of my desktop:

 

MyComputer_zpsd3007593.png

 

The monitor is 1920x1080 now, but everything else is probably the same.

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Awww yiss.

 

Starting from the top, our internet comes in from CenturyLink on a ZyXEL C1000Z modem/router with a /29 of IPv4 addrsses statically assigned. These go off to certain machines in the network. The modem's builtin wireless AP is not used because it sucks, but the internal 4-port gigabit switch is. All the cabling is cat6/7 because why not.

 

Machines on the network:

 

tellurium.calref.net. (70.56.40.66) - AMD FX-4350 / 32GB RAM (1600) / ~4 TiB formatted filesystem across 4 HDDs / Debian wheezy. This machine is used by calref for running assorted game servers, build agents, and other stuff too intensive to run on the main webserver. Funded by generous donations from calref memberbase.

 

iridium.calref.net. (70.56.40.65) - AMD FX-8150 / 32 GB RAM (1600) / ~2 TiB formatted filesystem across 1 HDD (as well as a 120 GB SSD for system stuff) / nVidia GeForce GTX 760 / Win7 Professional. My personal machine, used for copious amounts of gaming, programming, web design, and reviewing of Important Financial Documents.

 

lithium.calref.net (no public address) - some crappy dell laptop / it has ram, i think / 300GB (i think) hdd / debian wheezy. Laptop used for radiorefuge broadcasts. it's a piece of crap but it's got enough hamster wheels to run a radio show. It's attached to a treasure trove of audio equipment I've bought (if there's interest, I can post about this in the radio thread, but it's out of scope of this topic).

 

K - Neb's computer. It has lights and makes fan noises? I'm sure Neb can elaborate.

 

L - Neb's computer that Iffy uses. It also has lights and makes fan noises? I'm sure Neb or Iffy can elaborate.

 

Other Misc stuff:

- the entire network runs on gigabit ethernet and 802.11b/g/n wireless. I've got a TRENDnet TEG-S80G switch to add more space and a Linksys EA-2700 to provide a wireless AP (this was the old router when we had comcast, but is still around because it has a superior wireless antenna).

- My phone, Captain SyPhone of Squad Two, and my old iPod (niobium.calref.net.) sit on the network most of the time.

- Neb has his phone and a tablet. I don't know what either of them are but they are very phone-like and tablet-like.

- Iffy has a Wii.

- tellurium also hosts a VPN that I use sometimes when I'm out and about on a cell network. There's also one on vanadium (the calref webhost).

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I don't have quite as much going on here as I used to, but yeah, we have a lot of computers here. I haven't saved a lot of the specs and I doubt anyone cares for random trivia, so the thirty second summary:

 

A - The laptop I used when I came here in 2008. It was used with a dial-up modem on top of a bag of ice because the modem would die it the laptop went over about 30 degrees C. I mailed it to Iffy in 2011 and got it back when I moved years later. I don't think it had more than 1.6Ghz or so on a single core.

B - I got this laptop as a donation to use for BOINC because the screen was broken and most of the RAM was bad. Honestly, I don't remember a lot about it because it became spare parts.

D - This was also a BOINC donation PC that I had to leave behind when I moved. I want to say dual 2.4?

E - I don't remember this one at all.

F - The first named computer, named so before the alphabet naming convention. This computer saw thousands of Geneforge and Age of Empires hours. It spent most of its time. Dual core 2.1 Ghz

G - This was a 300 Mhz laptop that I ended up deprecating because it just wasn't worth the electricity it cost to run.

H - The first decent computer I built...on a budget. 4 core 3.4Ghz

I - This is a tablet.

J - This was Sy's ancient and horrible computer. It was basically G if G was a PC.

K - This is my current computer. 8 core 3.8Ghz.

L - This is Iffy's computer, made from spare parts. dual 3.4

 

Obligatory Chart

Red dots=death dates

Yellow boxes=when I built them (or bought them if they weren't PCs)

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I've mostly had two machines running over the years (a desktop and a laptop); they've been replaced a few times though. Currently I'm down to one laptop, so that's not as interesting. The entire network consists of one router and wifi AP (EasyBox).

 

starbright was the first laptop (Samsung V25) that was actually my own, and it was in service the longest (September 2004-September 2009), and I still occasionally use it when I need XP and don't have a VM available. It's the only computer I have that can reliably run Age of Empires II and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

 

enki was my first Linux (Ubuntu, 9.04-10.10) desktop (AMD Athlon, dual-core, 2GB RAM). (September 2009-December 2012; CoD: Mobo failure during RAM upgrade).

 

metis was an HP 625 laptop (February 2011-September 2014; CoD: hard drive failure). Since the screen was already broken by an earlier accident, I replaced it with another one of the same model.

 

dagon was enki's successor (AMD Phenom, quad-core, 4GB), (March 2013-December 2014; CoD: Mobo failure). The motherboard randomly failed exactly two years after enki kicked it. Maybe it's a curse. It was running debian sid.

 

luna (happyluna.png) is the successor of metis, and currently my only computer (October 2014-). It's still running Ubuntu 14.04.

 

I have a phone (Nexus 4) that doesn't really have a name (because it's not rooted, so how would I even set the hostname? :p ), although I call it athena in some config files. (August 2013-)

 

Oh, and my desktop at work is named rom (German spelling of Rome; the department uses capital cities as names).

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Yaaaay someone noticed this thread! w00t!

 

ZyXEL C1000Z modem/router

 

How's the firmware on that thing? Still being updated? Or did you replace it with e.g. OpenWRT?

 

To be honest I don't trust router firmware very much. It might have a smaller code base than e.g. IPFire's Linux kernel, but it gets outdated fast (especially if it's Linux based). And old routers tend to not get firmware updates at all.

 

a /29 of IPv4 addrsses statically assigned... internal 4-port gigabit switch

 

Separate subnets, right? I should do that at some point. There was one memorable occasion when flying-dutchman was compromised - compiling stuff with GCC that I didn't order, while I was away from keyboard - and I think that happened via one of the Windows PCs, which was also very obviously compromised. (Tiny little binaries on the C: drive that drew all red flags on VirusTotal.)

 

Since implementing outbound iptables rules on doomguard I've not seen any more compromises on my network, but that could be coincidental; I should still put the Windows boxes on a different subnet just in case. I'd need another switch for that though, and probably have to mess with the wiring a lot.

 

(Alternative would be using wireless and wired for separate LANs. That might be more feasible, what with the laptops. I'm not really a fan of wireless though.)

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Starting from the top, our internet comes in from CenturyLink on a ZyXEL C1000Z modem/router... The modem's builtin wireless AP is not used because it sucks...

If you think that's bad, you should have seen the one they used before that one. :p

 

My modem is a Motorola Surfboard SB6121 cable modem. It's connected to my primary router, a TP-LINK TL-WDR4300. I have two gigabit ethernet switches (I don't know the models off the top of my head) hooked up in different areas of the house as well as an Apple AirPort Extreme (which used to be my primary router) and an AiPort Express operating as wireless access points. (It's a big old house, so one AP doesn't get the job done.)

 

Hezekiah, my personal desktop is a hackintosh running OS X 10.9 (I had some issues getting 10.10 running stably on it when it first came out and haven't put any serious effort into getting it to work since) It has a 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 with hyper-threading, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 with 1GB of VRAM, and 12GB of DDR3 1600 RAM. The OS is running on a 120GB SSD. It also has 7 HDDs, totaling 19.25TB. This computer is used mostly for file storage and doing CPU-intensive things like video transcoding.

 

Zechariah, my gaming PC, is microATX system (Portability is useful, since I am frequently moving it back and forth between my desk and my TV, as well as occasionally taking it to LAN parties.) running Windows 8.1. It has a 3.5GH dual-core Intel Core i3 with hyper-threading, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 with 4GB of VRAM, and 8GB of DDR3 1600 RAM. The OS is running on a 100GB SSD, and it also has a 2TB HDD for storage.

 

Melchizedek, my laptop, is a Mid-2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro running OS X 10.10. It has a 2.6 quad-core Intel Core i7 with hyper-threading, an Nvidia GeForce GT 650M with 1GB VRAM, 16GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, and a 768GB SSD.

 

Zephaniah, my work desktop, is a fairly anemic PC running Windows 7, since I do my job through a hosted VM. It has a 2.5GHZ Intel Pentium Dual-Core, an Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS with 640MB of VRAM, an Nvidia GeForce 8400GX with 512MB of VRAM (two GPUS to drive 4 displays), 6GB of DDR2 800 RAM, and a 120GB SSD.

 

Nehemiah, my 3rd generation Apple TV.

 

Pluto, my 32GB retina iPad mini.

 

Anubis, my 64GB iPhone 6.

 

Alexandria, my Kindle Voyage.

 

i have a number of unarmed devices as well: an HP printer (not sure what model), an AppleWatch, a Panasonic plasma TV (I never actually use any of the "smart" functions on this), a Samsung CableCard box, a PS3, a PS4, a Wii (for playing GameCube games over component video), a Wii U, a PSP (rooted with various emulators installed), a PS Vita, and a 3DS XL.

 

My housemate has a desktop PC with specs similar to my gaming computer, a MacBook Air, two iPhones 5S (work and personal), a second generation Apple TV, a PS3, and an XBox One.

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So, there are quite a few machines contacted to our network (my housemates all have phones and computers, and two have tablets), but I don't know much about those. My stuff includes:

 

Nausicaa, my iPhone 5S. Previous phones were Kiki and Chihiro. I picked Nausicaa for my most recent one because it fit the Ghibli criteria I previously had, plus the naming convention I currently use for computers.

 

Nikki's Nook, a 16gb rooted Nook HD+. Not the tablet I'd have chosen for myself, but it was a prize from university for writing the best dissertation in my graduating year. I mainly use it for reading, and for streaming movies/netflix.

 

Athene (who was cannibalized), my first custom PC. It had a 3.1ghz i3, 8GB RAM, GTX 650, and 1TB HDD. I had it running OSX 10.8 and Windows 7. Once this machine saw me through university, I decided to upgrade. I kept my case, the ram, and my optical disk drive,

 

Bia, the machine that grew from Athene. Another custom-built desktop computer (3.4ghz dual core i5 / 16GB RAM / GTX 970 / 2TB HDD, 128GB SSD).

 

Lissa, an old HP laptop I don't use anymore. It has a dual core processor, 3GB RAM. Not sure what else. Or if it even works.

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How's the firmware on that thing? Still being updated? Or did you replace it with e.g. OpenWRT?

According to itself, it has the "CZC001-4.12.008.13" firmware, whatever that means (according to itself this is up to date, at least). I haven't messed with it as much as I should have, but I'd like to get OpenWRT or something similar on it eventually. The problem is I'll have hell to pay if I brick it :p

 

I'm guessing CenturyLink still pushes updates to it, I've only had it for about six months so unless they shipped it the day they moved to something else...

 

Separate subnets, right? I should do that at some point.

I probably should too :p. We do a lot of games which rely on broadcast/multicast so having them on different subnets kind of messes things up (iridium initially was assigned only the external address, and that caused many issues, so now it has both). I haven't dealt too much with side of things. As for isolating the linux and windows machines, tellurium is relatively-hardened (just a couple dinky ufw rules), and lithium is usually off, so I don't see that being an issue.

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According to itself, it has the "CZC001-4.12.008.13" firmware, whatever that means (according to itself this is up to date, at least). I haven't messed with it as much as I should have, but I'd like to get OpenWRT or something similar on it eventually. The problem is I'll have hell to pay if I brick it :p

 

Right, bricking it wouldn't be good. Hmm.

 

http://www.zyxel.com/us/en/products_services/c1000z.shtml?t=p

 

It's from ~2013, I'd hope they're still updating the firmware!

 

Also

 

Through ZyXEL’s implementation

of dual Ethernet firewalls (NAT and SPI), the C1000Z is able to identify and manage malicious content and

applications

 

*giggle* *snort*

 

I'm guessing CenturyLink still pushes updates to it, I've only had it for about six months so unless they shipped it the day they moved to something else...

 

I did some Googling, I *think* the firmware updates are invoked manually? Not sure though.

 

Oh. Couple other things re proprietary routers like that, one should:

 

1. Make sure the admin interface is not accessible from the WAN side. Likewise any kind of SSH access. This is inconvenient, but a lot of routers have factory user accounts with weak passwords.

 

2. Make sure UPnP is disabled. If you have outbound rules, UPnP allows them to be bypassed.

 

(Okay okay, done 'splaining now.)

 

I probably should too :p. We do a lot of games which rely on broadcast/multicast so having them on different subnets kind of messes things up (iridium initially was assigned only the external address, and that caused many issues, so now it has both). I haven't dealt too much with side of things. As for isolating the linux and windows machines, tellurium is relatively-hardened (just a couple dinky ufw rules), and lithium is usually off, so I don't see that being an issue.

 

In my case there's extra impetus: the two Windows PCs belong to my dad, who has historically been a lightning rod for malware...

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I'm guessing CenturyLink still pushes updates to it, I've only had it for about six months so unless they shipped it the day they moved to something else...

It is still updated, and will most likely be for a while. They just switched to this particular series recently, and it is the standard modem for single line VDSL customers along with the C1000A (same hardware but made by Actiontec instead of Zyxel)

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I do not currently have any creative names, but I have a cable router with wi-fi that provides a LAN connection to a PC and to another wi-fi router which provides LAN connections to a fairly old iMac and an XBOX 360. The XBOX lan connection can be shifted to the Wii or Apple TV as required. Using wi-fi, there are a repeater, three Dell laptops (one being a new, small, touch screen model), one Mac Book, one nook, one i-pad mini, one i-pod, another wii and five android based smart phones.

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I have my laptop, been three years since I first unboxed it, nothing more I guess.

 

Aaron the Casul +0 [cannot be ascended] (laptop) Intel HD Graphics 4000 mobile/Intel i5/1.7GHz/4GB ram/500GB HD space

 

One of the treasures granted to the firstborn, it withstood eons of reformatting, installing, uninstalling, free Windows 8.1 upgrades, Steam game downloading, visits to Spiderweb and the occasional playing of Dark Tranquillity music along with a headbang. The filthy casul of the laptop belonged to Aaron, it became his true symbol when he in turn endured the abysmal fathoms of 10-5fps, earning him the title of 5fpswalker

 

The object grants basic internet surfing and casul gaming and general usage

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I have noticed a considerable speed increase when I have the cable plugged in. We don't really use the wii anymore and the apple TV is for watching an occasional movie, so it is nice to have the faster connection. They do both connect wirelessly as well of course. One of my long term projects is to run LAN cable through the house, but that hasn't happened yet.

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It is still updated, and will most likely be for a while. They just switched to this particular series recently, and it is the standard modem for single line VDSL customers along with the C1000A (same hardware but made by Actiontec instead of Zyxel)

 

Okay good - apologies if I caused any alarm about this BTW.

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  • 1 year later...

Time for updates!

 

For some reason I recycled the sulfras designation for a new router. This is an Optiplex GX620 (slimline) with an extra PCI ethernet card, running OpenBSD. Performance is better than the old Cisco router I was using for a while, and the pf firewall is great for stuff like this, much simpler to configure than Linux's iptables. Source-based updates are a bit annoying though.

 

The original netbook sulfras is now grayarea again, this time with a 250 GB SSD. (The main benefit of this is fast boots; overall speed benefit is not impressive with a 32-bit Atom processor, and battery life is not in any way improved.) I'm waffling between grayarea and hoatzin (formerly defiant) for mobile needs; hoatzin has more CPU power, 64-bit support, and is astonishingly fast with the SSD, but is also very heavy and bulky (especially with the gigantic new battery pack I bought for it). And its large size makes it feel disturbingly flimsy vs. the netbook. So for now, grayarea is the one I take to coding meetups and stuff, even though it takes 2-3 times longer to compile stuff.

 

harvest-lore is still basically the same, in terms of hardware.

 

And that's basically that. Oh, and my Linux machines now run Void Linux. I was using Debian Stable with backports for a while, but there's just not enough stuff backported.

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My network has changed a bit. I switched from Comcast cable to Verizon fiber, so I no longer have a modem. I have no idea what the make and model of my fiber ONT is.

 

My primary router is still a TP-LINK TL-WDR4300. It had been running DD-WRT, but I was having some issues with it not remembering saved settings, so I recently put the stock firmware back on it. The rest of my networking equipment is that same as it was last year, except I now have three gigabit ethernet switches instead of just two hooked up in different areas of the house. I still have an Apple AirPort Extreme (which used to be my primary router) and an AiPort Express operating as wireless access points. (It's a big old house, so one AP doesn't get the job done.)

 

Hezekiah, my personal desktop and media server is now a 2010 Mac Pro running the macOS 10.11 beta. It has a 2 2.93GHz hex-core Intel Xeon Westmere CPUs (With hyper threading this adds up to 24 parallel processing threads.), an ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU with 1GB of VRAM (Not much, I know, but I don't do much gaming on this machine) and 32GB of DDR3 1333 RAM. The OS is running on a 500 GB SSD. It also has 5 HDDs, totaling 24TB. This computer is used mostly for storage and doing CPU-intensive things like video transcoding. This computer and my gaming PC are both connected to a curved, ultrawide 3440x1440 34" LG 34UC87C monitor.

 

Zechariah, my gaming PC, is miniITX system (Portability is useful, since I am frequently moving it back and forth between my desk and my TV, as well as occasionally taking it to LAN parties.) running Windows 10. It now has a 3.6GH quad-core Intel Core i7-4790 Haswell CPU, an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW GPU with 8GB of VRAM, and 16GB of DDR3 1600 RAM. The OS is running on a 100GB SSD, and it also has a 2TB HDD for storage.

 

Melchizedek, my primary laptop, is a Mid-2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro running the macOS 10.11 beta. It has a 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-3720QM Ive Bridge CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GT 650M GPU with 1GB VRAM, 16GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, and a 768GB SSD.

 

Haggai, my work desktop, is a PC running Windows 10, since I do my job through a hosted VM. It has a 3.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i3-4150 CPU, an EVGA GeForce GTX 670 GPU with 4GB of VRAM 8GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, and a 120GB SSD. This machine is connected to 4 1080p displays.

 

Abiathar, my secondary laptop, is Late 2008 15" MacBook Pro running OS X 10.10. It has a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn CPU, an Nvidia Geforce 9600M GT GPU with 256MB of VRAM, 8GB of DDR3 1066 RAM, and a 240GB SSD. This machine is used for web browsing and watching video while gaming on my gaming PC.

 

Nehemiah, my 3rd generation Apple TV.

 

Hel, my 64GB iPhone 6S.

 

Aginor, my 64GB iPad Air 2.

 

Greenwich, my Apple Watch Sport.

 

Alexandria, my Kindle Voyage.

 

i have a number of unarmed devices as well: a Brother laser printer (not sure what model), a Panasonic plasma TV (I never actually use any of the "smart" functions on this), a PS3, a PS4, a Wii U, a PSP (rooted with various emulators installed), and a 3DS XL.

 

My housemate has a 2008 Mac Pro, a 2015 12" MacBook, an iPhone 6S, an iPhone 5S, an iPad Air 2, a fourth generation Apple TV, a PS3, and an XBox One.

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