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Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry by Ethan Kaplan, VP Product, Live Nation

2

My So Called Digital Life Part 2: Networking

When I was in my teenage years and just getting into the Internet, I dreamed of a time when I could have persistent connectivity and ubiquitous computing. I was promised at one point that I’d be able to plug a computer into my phone and have a two megabit connection. That never materialized. Ricochet did, and at home I had ISDN (dual channel), with 128kbps of connectivity. Fast for those days.

The hallmark of my digital life has always been connectivity. I always considered myself living a bifurcated life: online and off, and having to maintain both at the same time.

To that point, I also don’t make distinction between work and home when it comes to connectivity. To suit me, I need to have network access on all devices that can blend seamlessly between all available systems that are in my purview: work, data-center and home.

So lets get to how I did my network architecture. First the diagram.

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The network is fairly simplistic at my house, but the primary aim is to make my house a remote branch office for WBR and provide hard-line VPN access from my house to our datacenter. Because i have this, and my house has a dedicated class-C subnet on the same topology as the office network, all my machines at the office are available directly for AFP, VNC and other remote administration/access methods.

This also has the provided benefit that from the office, I can access all the devices at my house. Here are some run downs:

Connectivity

Because I use my home as an extension of the office, the quality of the connection is hugely important. I used to have DSL, but because of the distance from the central-office, I was limited as to the speed of the connection. About a year ago I switched to a Charter Cable Business connection, which is 20 mbps down, 2 mbps up. The difference between the business line and consumer, besides the cost is that I have multiple IP addresses that are static, an enforceable SLA, priority support and a relaxed terms of use for running things like web servers, VPN’s, etc.

I’ve found that 20 by 2 is pretty damned fast, although I am keeping an eye out on faster alternatives as they become available where I live. Right now we are looking at getting a new house, and we are certainly looking at available bandwidth as a prerequisite (how could you not?).

Termination Point and Devices

The cable connection terminates underneath my entertainment unit. This is good, as the largest concentration of ethernet ports in the house is in the entertainment unit. Off the cable modem I have a Netscreen 5GT, and off that an Airport Extreme (dual band) and a Netgear gigabit switch.

The devices that are hardline connected are:

  • Receiver (Denon 3801CI)
  • AppleTV
  • Mac Mini HTPC
  • DirectTV HR21
  • Samsung Bluray player
  • Sonos ZP80
  • Slingbox
  • Airport Extreme Dual Band

Wireless Network

The wireless network consists of all Airport Extreme base stations. I used to have Netgear N network devices, but they had a rather severe ramp effect when out of range. The MacBook Pro would show full bars, but no IP traffic would go across. I have the primary access point in the living room. Inside my desk in the dining area is a Airport Express N which acts as a bridge for the Cisco IP phone, which is synced to my office line. In the master bedroom we have another Airport Extreme N which acts as a relay/bridge for the room as well as the DirectTV HR20 upstairs.

We also have two 801.11G cameras in the house, one on the balcony for the front door and one that we use as a baby monitor.

Topology

My house has its own class C network which sits in the same class B as the Warner office. I assigned DNS entries to most of the devices in the house to ease me accessing them from the office. I use this for instance, to watch the webcams from my office (so I can see my baby) as well as grab files from my home drives from the office and vice-versa. I likewise assigned names to my work machines.

Changes

Like I said, we’re looking at moving in the next six months or so, as we’ve out grown the townhouse. When we move, one of the things I’d like to do is drop cat-6 cable through the house to ports i each bedroom, and terminate the points in a wire closet in the house. I’d prefer to get more robust gear in there, including a configurable layer-3 switch, a beefier Netscreen and spread the wireless access points through more of the house. A gigabit whole house network would also allow me to experiment with video distribution over cat-5 or IP, and put a whole house PBX in using Asterisk.

Coming up: computing devices, entertainment unit/AV, home automation and more!