Maintainer
Maintained by Dick Schoeller.
Last modified: 12 September 2007
We are still running a pretty nifty network at our house. Most of the computers are recovered from salvage, with parts bought when necessary. Most are Pentium IIs of one sort or another. However, we had a lightning strike a while back and had some rebuilds to do. If you don't have good power protection get it! Besides the computer stuff mentioned below, we had to replace a Sony WEGA TV.
My main server is a PIII 733 on a Gigabyte AT motherboard. It's got about 100G of disk. It's running RedHat 7.3 today. This machine is a rebuild of a Pentium Pro after the lightning strike. Chances are that RedHat 8.0 will be in this box soon.
The Linksys switch has been replaced by an SMC, another lightning casualty. It is still rackmount but we are up to 16 ports. The other major change after the lightning strike was the deployment of APC UPS's at every PC.
The web server that you are reading this form is an NEC Versa 6230 laptop running RedHat 7.1 and Apache 1.3.22. This turns out to be a pretty convenient setup. It takes very little space in the rack and draws very little power.
The distribution point for the network is a Middle Atlantic wall-mount rack that I picked up at U-Do-It Electronics in Needham, MA. This is attached to a mounting board near the breaker panel. I've run CAT-5 from a patch panel all over the house. The telephone also distributes from a 110 punch-down block on this board.