Network: TK's home network / server cabinet(s)

[marcoi]

Since 1999 from home? It just doesn't seem cost effective. Then again my knowledge of trading platforms is limited I really don't know enough to understand the need/want for it in a home environment. I think it'd make more sense to me if it was some sort of backup network at home for a business owner. The electric bill plus the use of electricity just seems wasteful in my opinion. Not that anyone is asking and I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade just trying to understand..

I miss understood, you meant what the OP was doing with all that equipment. That I don't know. I was referring to the off topic comment about the time needing to be within ms accurate for a trading platform. Sorry for any confusion.

You'll find many of the people on the forums here are hardcore when it comes to home networks. They use their IT knowledge (either from loving it or work with it or both) to make services available at home.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

I miss understood, you meant what the OP was doing with all that equipment. That I don't know. I was referring to the off topic comment about the time needing to be within ms accurate for a trading platform. Sorry for any confusion.

You'll find many of the people on the forums here are hardcore when it comes to home networks. They use their IT knowledge (either from loving it or work with it or both) to make services available at home.

A number of things. I design file servers and other stuff, even though I'm semi-retired. The stuff here is proof-of-concept (and also gets used - see below). I also host some open source projects here - for example, the Dell PowerEdge R710 is (among other things) ftp.infozip.org. I also have my own mail server, etc.

History:

When I left my job running Academic Computing for a college in 1999, I bought a pair of small(ish) DEC Alphaservers (200 4/233) to run VMS (this is the DEC VMS, not VMs as in virtual machines) on, as I was used to VMS from my job and I was able to just copy over my mail files, home directory, etc. from the VMS systems at the college. You can see these in the January 2000 picture (beige systems with visible floppy and CD-ROM drives in the top 1/3 of the cabinet. Not visible in the picture is a Netgear ND520 file server (mounted in the back) which was a primitive NAS. The systems in the bottom 2/3 of the cabinets are home-built PC-class systems running BSDi's BSD/OS.

In the 2003 picture, the original Alphaservers have been combined into one more powerful Alphaserver DS10. The Unix boxes have been combined into a single Intel-based ISP2150 chassis. The ND520 has been replaced by an ever-growing collection of Snap Server 4100's. And there's a new, better UPS. The Snap servers are mostly full of my CD collection at this point.

In 2005, the Snap servers have been replaced by my original RAIDzillas (my page here, SmallNetBuilder page here, available in many language translations from Tom's Hardware like this one) and the Intel chassis has been replaced with a Dell PowerEdge 750.

Between then and now, there were a number of changes, including 4TB RAIDzilla -> 32TB RAIDzilla II -> 128TB RAIDzilla 2.5, the Dell 750 -> R300 -> R710. The separate Alphaserver DS10 was migrated to an emulation VM (yup, VMS under a VM) under FreeBSD in the R710. Tape backup evolved from DLT8000 -> SDLT600 -> LTO4 -> LTO6 as storage grew.

In each of these changes, the equipment became more power-efficient and was consolidated - there was just more of it. A 128TB RAIDzilla 2.5 runs around 300W with 7200 RPM SAS drives. That is less than the stack of 6 Snap 4100's (360W, 720GB).

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

i want to know what a GPS+PPS PiHat is.

Probably worth its own thread at this point to be honest, but in order for GPS to work, what with the satellites flying around at high speeds (they move fast enough for relativity to play an important part in timing accuracy) they need super-accurate clocks on board the satellites, and thus the GPS signals also have time signals in the data. Combine a GPS receiver with a PPS (pulse per second) signal and you've got yourself an extremely accurate source of time, and this can be done with very cheap hardware if need be.

Pi Hats are add-one boards for raspberry Pi's. Some enterprising soul made on that incorporated a GPS receiver and a PPS generator so it's possible to put together a very accurate clock together for very little money.

TK's clock is an example of what you did before GPS was available, or if you can't afford to rely on GPS and/or radio clocks for an accurate time source.

They use their IT knowledge (either from loving it or work with it or both) to make services available at home.

Yeah, my work on MiFID II was interesting enough for me that I wanted a stab at building and using my own clock at home rather than relying on the NTP pool. Don't think Terry's ever been involved in trading but there's a need for super accurate timekeeping in a great many professions (and I don't know why it's taken microsoft so long to get serious about accurate timekeeping, but w32tm was absolute garbage prior to 2012 and is still inferior to NTP today) so it was well worth the effort for me. I think Terry's cellar is just a testament to where that attitude lands you when you persist with it over the length of a career

(and I mean that as a compliment!)

 

[Patrick]

@Terry Kennedy and @EffrafaxOfWug

I just did a briefing on the Microsemi SyncServer S600 and this thread/ discussion came to mind. Thanks for the re-read benefit!