Your home server & Network

platypus said:
Are you guys with racks network engineers out of interest? Or do you just play about with hardware in your spare time?
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'Does anything' is my official title, which changes every week depending on the client/job :p

Work entails planning networks and the builds, liasing with purchasing manager and the client, and then seeing it through till the end so it ends up looking like it should:


And (hopefully!) working like it should too!

See if you can spot the couple of mistakes/unfinished bits ;) :D

Dave and ThomP: how much where your racks if you don't mind me asking? Would love one for home but the £600 RRP for a 24U is a bit steep :o

dave-lew99 said:
This way i can pick up cheap kit from eBay and the likes to play with before using the knowledge to sell the idea to the bosses and get the proper stuff in.
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I've just bagged an xSeries 235 with dual 2.4GHz Xeon's, 1GB RAM, 2 x 160GB SCSI, 3 x 75GB SCSI, 1 x 36GB SCSI, LTO2 tape drive for £80 :D Need a rack to start getting organised :)
 
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I would love to get a rack and some old kit to play with and learn with, but the problem is I am told that most rack mounted servers are not designed for home use and so are very loud and power hungry, so not something i can run 24/7 in my room :(
 
Dist said:
I would love to get a rack and some old kit to play with and learn with, but the problem is I am told that most rack mounted servers are not designed for home use and so are very loud and power hungry, so not something i can run 24/7 in my room :(
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Whilst what you've said is true, doesn't mean you can't play with old SME level stuff.

A couple of hundred quid will get you far on the bay, and most of the modern pedestal servers designed for SMEs are relatively quiet and don't use too much power (the SC420 I use for the majority of my Linux stuff has a 2.8GHz Celeron :o)

Remember that most enterprise level software and services will run comfortably on commodity hardware. So you can setup a fully fledged 'server' on any bit of old kit. Enterprise level hardware is only needed when you have the requirements of a large enterprise (redundancy, high availability, remote management etc).

I wouldn't advise using your money on rack mount kit until you have a real need for it - I've got a PE2600 that I only turn on when I want to play around with my RedHat/CentOS GFS/Clustering project, because of the reasons you've stated (noise primarily - can hear it anywhere in the house :o). The 2600 was given to me, so it's not something I would have purchased otherwise.

As such, I'm sort of regretting purchasing the xSeries already, but the amount of kit there for £80 was irresistible. If I broke it down into parts (which will probably end up happening) I could sell it on and make a nice bit of profit.
 
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Well one of the reasons i was thinking of getting a rack is because I am comming to the end of my CCNA course, and would like some more hands on experience with cisco kit before i take the offical cisco exam. Although this may not need a rack at all i intend to expand the lab to cover the CCNP stuff as well as having a server so it will slowly grow. Also i wasn't thinking of a full size proper rack but one of the ones i saw on the bay called a skeletek rack which seems to be just a base and 2 struts going up the side to hold lighter weight items such as routers/switches (although there are some skeletec racks with an adition pair of verticle struts to add stability for heavier items such as full size servers).

As for a service i obviously dont need anything powerfull just to test and learn, but I would like it to be powerfull to at least run 1 windows server 2008 virtual machine (since i can get a copy of server 2008 for free from dreamspark) and 1 linux virtual machine to test the more buisness oriented side of linux (such as running services and such rather then just using linux as a desktop machine).
 
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Those Skeletec's are awesome! :D Thanks for the tip off
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You've probably already seen this, but this guy looks to be doing exactly what you'll be doing - definitely want one of those.

I'd say they were better than the 24U full depth cabs, much less obtrusive and look good aswell. Would be great if there was a similar sort of thing for servers - can't find those additional vertical struts though?

Think I might get one along with a couple of shelves for my network kit - thanks again for the tip off :cool:
 
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Dist said:
As for a service i obviously dont need anything powerfull just to test and learn, but I would like it to be powerfull to at least run 1 windows server 2008 virtual machine (since i can get a copy of server 2008 for free from dreamspark) and 1 linux virtual machine to test the more buisness oriented side of linux (such as running services and such rather then just using linux as a desktop machine).
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A little pedestal server would handle that comfortably. The SC420 would be more than capable, or if you're after something more recent the HP ML115s are great little machines, relatively cheap and run ESXi without a problem.

Of course, I know a guy who can get you a good price on an xSeries 235 - cost him £400 but he'll sell to you for £195 ;) :D
 
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Dist said:
Well one of the reasons i was thinking of getting a rack is because I am comming to the end of my CCNA course, and would like some more hands on experience with cisco kit before i take the offical cisco exam. Although this may not need a rack at all i intend to expand the lab to cover the CCNP stuff as well as having a server so it will slowly grow. Also i wasn't thinking of a full size proper rack but one of the ones i saw on the bay called a skeletek rack which seems to be just a base and 2 struts going up the side to hold lighter weight items such as routers/switches (although there are some skeletec racks with an adition pair of verticle struts to add stability for heavier items such as full size servers).

As for a service i obviously dont need anything powerfull just to test and learn, but I would like it to be powerfull to at least run 1 windows server 2008 virtual machine (since i can get a copy of server 2008 for free from dreamspark) and 1 linux virtual machine to test the more buisness oriented side of linux (such as running services and such rather then just using linux as a desktop machine).
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I'd strongly advise forgetting about buying kit for home CCNA practice in particular, running GNS3 on a powerful machine is a much better option...you won't get a cheap 7200 on ebay and you really need that or similar when you get beyond CCNA and basic CCNP stuff.
 
bigredshark said:
I'd strongly advise forgetting about buying kit for home CCNA practice in particular, running GNS3 on a powerful machine is a much better option...you won't get a cheap 7200 on ebay and you really need that or similar when you get beyond CCNA and basic CCNP stuff.
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Only problem with GNS3 is you need the IOS images. Don't you need a smartnet agreement to be able to download these?

Andy
 
andyd said:
Only problem with GNS3 is you need the IOS images. Don't you need a smartnet agreement to be able to download these?

Andy
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Ah, I constantly forget that not everybody has a CCO login to download anything they choose (literally anything - it's tied to a service provider support account)
 
To answer a few questions.

I work for an ISP so my job is very varied hence the mount of kit I have. All of my kit is usually new but heavily discounted. I'm always looking for more kit but at the right price. I'm currently looking for a SAS SAN.

I paid around £400 for that 24U" dell rack which was brand new & strangely they threw in a 3yr 4H warranty with it.
 
I haven't got a clue what a trust is ...

I've just updated my profile with with my msn messanger address.
 
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