In a previous blog entry, I talked about my network infrastructure.

Some things have changed since then, so I figured it would be a good idea to outline what I've changed.

Firewall

I'm still using PFSense. It's fantastic. There was one hitch, the hard drive on that old notebook died. Fortunately, you can run PFSense off the boot CD and use a USB key to store the data. That's exactly what I'm doing.

Network Storage

I mentioned in the earlier article that I was using FreeNAS. Well, that didn't work out too great. As hardware begins to fail (my RAID 1 did), it becomes a bit of a pain to get things off. I have since retired that FreeNAS box and changed my storage strategy completely. You know, it's cool to build your own hardware, etc. but it's also a huge time suck.

Failures don't happen when you're bored, they happen when you're too busy to be spending time fixing things.

Since most of my machines are Macs, I've put an external drive on each of them and have them running Time Machine. On my main machine, I alternate between two different Time Machine drives for a little extra bit of safety.

With the multiple hard drive failures in the past 12 months, I got sick of giving money to hard drive manufacturers, and bought a subscription to CrashPlan. All of my critical data is archived into the cloud this way. A bonus is that the software lets you back up to other computers on the network. As such, each of my Macs has two extra backup copies stored elsewhere in my home network. The cost of the subscription for me is less than the cost of one hard drive per year. Totally worthwhile.

Finally, I am using Dropbox, a cloud file syncing service. This is a fantastic service. I believe you can get a 2GB account for free. I am also a paying subscriber with Dropbox as well. It is invaluable for sharing data across your computers and mobile devices. Note that the difference between Dropbox and Crashplan is that I use Dropbox for live files, and Crashplan for archived files. It's a subtle but important difference.