Equipment for home lab

[threaded]

Oh, I forgot the 40 years of Wireless World that lives under my desk.

Not quite that many years, but I have a collection of that too. Also Elektor, Practical Wireless, Practical Electronics and a good few of the others that used to be around.

All going mouldy in a the large cellar on one of my houses.

[DaveB]

I feel sure that the labs at Marconi weren't graced with a Murphy B40 or a pair of Racal RA17s...

And there's more upstairs...

There's a word for people like you ZG

[zeitghost]

There's a word for people like you ZG

Steptoe?

Or Mr Trebus? (He of the Life of Grime fame, now sadly deceased).

[Fat Tom]

VMs...

Well I run my servers 24/7... (have 13 static IPs and they do email/web/Public DNS for my domain)

used to have 4 home PCs PIIs and PIIIs... in addition to 2 proliant 6500 quad processor PII with 1GB and 2GB of ram and storageworks with 14x18.2GB SCSI disks in it.....

Ran VMs on the 2 Proliants total 13 win2k3 servers (1 Netware too!!).... oh and 1 XP laptop client...

All was well until somebody came round to read the elecy meter.... (was a guesstimate bill proir to that) promptly got a bill for £1700... missus not happy...

so I have consolidated to 1 dual opteron server with 4GB ram running w2k3x64 with currently 6 VMs (including sql 2005 medium Sharpoint farm etc)
server cost in the region of 2.5k but I needed to get into the 64bit world anyways.... also have 2x mini ITX servers... 1 FW, 1DC... low power machines great to leave on when I'm away on holiday etc as these do email and dns duties for my domain...

not sure about electricity costs yet as I'm on a £170 a month guesstimate now...

gotta say VM is the way to go.. I can 'install' a windows server in less than 10 minutes... sure beats the hell out of digging around in old cardboard boxes for NICs etc..

The joys of being an IT contractor I guess....

- Fat Tom -