Home Network 2.0

I recently upgraded my entire house in terms of computers and network hardware. My old setup was a collection of my low-budget, post-college days so I decided to upgrade in one purchase (yikes!). I must say, the result is far better than I'd hoped. I thought I'd share the ups, downs, and unforeseens.

First, for reference, my old set up was:

• PowerMac Dual-G5, 30" Monitor - primary workstation, connected via wireless
• PowerBook G4 867 Mhz - used for travel, becoming increasingly obsolete
• Dell Latitude C840 Laptop - folded up under my bed running a linux server and serving as the OmniNerd test server as well as the gateway to my network from the outside, wired
• D-Link 802.11a/b router

The old setup worked, but it had some issues:

1. I was tethered to my desk if I wanted to do any "real" work. The PowerMac is an amazing machine, but it's about 50 lbs. and anything but mobile. To make matters worse, it's across the house from wired access, so I was forced to deal with the 802.11b limits. Blech.
2. The PowerBook had run it's course. It was simply too slow at doing anything more than checking email, etc.
3. The Dell had no wireless and therefore had to live under my bed, near the cable router that's plugged into the coax jack in my room. The whirling fans at night were getting annoying. It worked just fine, but it was the wrong tool for the job.
4. No media center for the TV. I would have loved to make Linux my media center and plugged it in to the TV in the living room, but the laptop was hopelessly tied to my bedroom so my TV was without computer input.

I decided to change all that [drum roll]:

• MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles, my new work horse
• MacBook Air ... my wife scored one with her work, booya
• Mac Mini 1.6 Ghz Core Duo, bought super-cheap on Craigslist from a girl who got it for Christmas last year and had never even opened it
• Time Capsule, 1TB, Apple's latest 802.11n wireless router with a built-in backup drive
• 4GB RAM for the MacBook Pro, 2GB for the Mini (purchase separately as Apple charges waaaay too much for RAM)
• Apple Bluetooth keyboard

I put the Time Capsule on the net and wow. By wow I mean holy freakin' crap. It is fast. Literally 10x faster than 11b in most cases. I went from 300KB/s to 3MB/s on downloads over the air. That alone made it worth the purchase. If you've not used Time Machine/Capsule, it's pretty nice. The Mac sends "net change" backups hourly to the Capsule and you can roll back as far into the past as you'd like (within the limits of your backup drive of course). It's also a network storage drive so I offloaded all the hard drive consuming movies to the Capsule and saved myself the storage on my laptop. I've got the two new laptops, the Mini, and the old G4 all syncing with it and it seems to handle them all just fine.

Next, I hooked up the Mini to my TV in the living room. Front Row is a great application for watching movies and listening to music all with the few clicks of the tiny Apple remote. I connected it wirelessly and without a keyboard or mouse after I learned that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has built in screen sharing. I can log into the mini remotely from my laptop as if I were on it locally. I get a full GUI environment and even over the wireless the performance is amazing. After playing with that, I installed a Fedora (Linux) virtual machine using the freely available VirtualBox. This quick install replicated exactly what the old Dell was doing, but didn't require me to use an entire system running Linux. Big score.

The Air and Pro are both smoking fast. I'm amazed at how much faster the dual-core 2.6 Ghz Intel is than the dual-processor G5 system. I suppose architecture progression and 4GB of RAM really do matter. I don't think I've ever used a system that felt this snappy though. Things that lagged or took a few seconds to start on the PowerMac are now seemingly instant. It's quite impressive. For example, I have OS X running natively, Windows XP running virtually, and Fedora running virtually and all seem to perform at native speeds. Granted, I've not done any gaming or stuff like that, but for everything else the lag isn't noticeable. This is nice for me because one of the pains of developing is ensuring what you've made looks good on a variety of platforms. Now I can run all those platforms side-by-side and check things out very easily from one laptop.

From a setup perspective I now use the super-tiny bluetooth keyboard for when I've got the laptop plugged into the 30" monitor in a "docked" sort of way, i.e., lid closed. The small keyboard is nice because it mimics the laptop keyboard, i.e., it doesn't have that damn number pad on the right side. Man I hate the part of standard keyboards. It forces you to use the mouse way out to the right and seems very bad in terms of ergonomics. No more. My mouse now resides about an inch from my return key. Also, I used to have a 30" + 17" monitor setup, but I've found that with Spaces one monitor is more than sufficient as I can just cycle through the other screens.

On the downside, the Air is quite frustrating. Twice I couldn't get it to read a disk on another computer via my old 802.11b router. I'm guessing there was some incompatibility since I've had no issues since the Time Capsule has been on the net, but still, if you're going to make a computer with no disk drive and claim it can read disks over the air, it'd better work. My only complaint thus far with the Pro is that the keyboard sits far back from the front of the laptop and can be uncomfortable on your wrists depending on the height of the table it's sitting on. It's pretty minor, but noticeable. Lastly, all computers' initial commit to the Time Capsule were long ones (12+ hours) as you have to transfer tons of data over the air. You can do it over a wire, but what's the fun in that? That was slightly annoying, but I guess there's not much you can do.

Overall, I'm amazed at the difference overall. The best part is that with the help of Craigslist this whole upgrade is going to cost me less than half of the retails cost of the upgrade. I love that site. I love people who buy old junk more.

Has anyone else upgraded their setups lately? I'd love to hear how people are integrating computing systems into their house.