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Network

The hole house has a lan access and RJ45 points on the walls (the foundations/conduit of this network where laided almost 5-10 years ago). This was maily done to stop the nead for many cables to be run exposed in the hall and across rooms, So when we had to rewire the hole house (we pulled every wire and started from scratch) we laid extra conduits in the wall for comunications. (Phone/TV/Network)

Durring this time i have run various servers ranging from windows NT, Windows 2000. but when microsoft decided to get nit picky with there updates and the operating systems got to big for the machines I could get hold of, I decided it was time to give Linux a go (and have never looked back). I get 150% better performace (don't need a gui), I can find software for free to solve the issues, and if not I can write or ammend software to suite

This is my current server rack

The main rack case came a tarmac site when they changed from distabuted network to some form of central storage.. they got rid of about 20 cabnets (but i only managed to get hold of one) it came with the ups (complete with good batteries) that gives me about 1:30 of backup power (and live stats about my power feed to the house via a web page and apcupsd. the severs are old dell dimensions running various stuf divided into common tasks

None of the machines are any thing special (all under 500mhz) and they all have internal web pages to aid admin and monitoring (none have a keyboard, mouse,monitor attached and thus all admin is done remotely).

Switches are 10/100's and discarded at work (one 24 port, one 16 port)

Main distrabution frame (cable terminator) came from a skip along with phone exchange (yet to be installed)

Hours of fun to setup but worth it in the end, but remember to get a book and not every thing down (topolagyies,install methods, username passowrds, etc.)

The last part is to automate the backup solution where all machines backup or archive data atomaticaly to 3 machine