Interchangeable hardware or “home cloud”
August 4, 2008 – 16:43Yesterday my border router in the home network crashed.
It was a P4 PC under Linux with several network cards routing a traffic between three Internet connections (yes, I’m paranoid), my home network and my house network.
That morning either CPU or motherboard fried and…
Now I’m thinking about something more interchangeable than stock PC. Well, actually, this is more about plug-n-play software than a hardware.
You may imagine that I have quite sophisticated routing setup here. Also this server ran squid, postfix, imap, traffic accounting software and was also a file server.
Most of the software is em… box-agnostic, at least until you move the config and data files. Routing is somewhat more difficult, since on a different PC box, ether mac addresses most probably would be different.
Ideal usage scenario would be something like that:
- Bring a replacement server, install a bare-bone system there and connect it to the network.
- Power the old system up on a temporary hardware (or just attach old drives to a new box)
- Issue something like vzmigrate of OpenVZ and, voila – new system has all old services up and running.
Obviously, that won’t be that easy with the routing, but if OS on both system have similar configs, that would save much time.
Interesting that the easiest implementation of this approach would be to do it verbatim: just move each service into its own OpenVZ VE – service appliance.
Unfortunately, the old system was set up in late 90th when the virtualization state of art was VmWare. So, I’m going to have a long-long-long evening 
