At home I use a Cisco 877 router as my internet gateway. I have found that it is so much more reliable then any of these cheap Chinese routers that you can buy and currently has an uptime of about 6 months. I use the access control lists extensively so that it only accepts mail from my mailhost (rollernet.us), accepts any traffic from my workplaces ip address, and keeps a log of all traffic that passes, or attempts to pass, in and out. I use kiwi syslog and kiwi logviewer to keep track of these logs and usually peruse them once a week to make sure nothing strange is going on.
In the past I have used MS TMG configured as a VM which filtered all the traffic and did AV scanning e.t.c but I found that it had an adverse effect on my gaming for some reason. Technically speaking it should have been fine but for some reason it would cause me massive lag. I also used to use Untangle when I was running VMWare on my server but now I have Hyper V I find that Untangle is really unstable so I’ve gone back to not having any kind of Unified Threat Management solution. I may change it sometime so that my current ISA 2006 server is also acting as a firewall as well as an RRAS server but my main reason for having a separate software firewall is for the antivirus scanning so I don’t think I will go down this path.
I also have a Buffalo Terastation with 4 250 Gig disks configured in RAID 5 configuration. This is used mainly for backup as I find that its too slow for much else. It does have a gigabit nic but I find that the transfer speeds are just too slow…something like 5MB a sec when they really should be around 40 – 50 which is the speed I get across the rest of my network when transferring files.
Finally, I have my main server configured to shutdown every night automatically. I just have a scheduled task that runs a batch file that contains the line
shutdown –s –t 0
All my VM’s suspend themselves and happily go to sleep until 6 in the morning when the bios in the server is set to wake itself up. The VM’s are set to power on when the server powers on so everything is ready to go when I wake up while still saving power by not running all night for no reason. All my email is queued up at rollernet.us so that it doesn’t bounce overnight, and is all downloaded once communication is re-established with exchange in SBS.
All in all it’s a tidy solution that doesn’t take up loads of space, is reasonably power efficient, is quiet as there aren’t loads of pc’s doing different things and lets me try out new systems with a minimum of fuss.
In my next post Ill write a bit more about how I made a template for Windows Server 2003 R2 that I can use with Hyper V, without having to use System Centre for anything
