A little background:
I’ve been building and tinkering with computers since I was about 12, when I got my own laptop and desktop both from garage sales and began swapping parts, doing OS upgrades from floppy disks and doing whatever I could to tinker with them. Fast forward almost two decades, and I’m still at but on a much larger scale.
When I moved into my house, I had some plans and had a fully set up network before I even had internet access to keep my busy mind occupied. My goals originally were to have a single system (based off a 2U) running everything virtually. This was limited to some degree however, and I’ve ended up where I am now.
- 1U server (dual core, 4GB of ram) running a firewall distro
- Cisco Catalyst 48 port gigabit switch for the backbone of the network
- 2U server running multiple VMs, including:
- Torrent system
- Web server (internal and external)
- External file hub
- Guest system
- Linux utility lab box
- Desktop white box running a Plex system and backups
This is overkill for even a small home business, but gives me ample options to tinker and mess around which is endlessly fun. At this point, everything is set up with static IPs and hostnames which all resolve internally. This has taken significant effort and time to accomplish but worth it given how stable everything has been and what I can tinker with when I want to. Onto the next challenge.