[thechat] Home Office Equipment

[Andrew Forsberg]

>If you want a Cisco router and have a wee bit of patience, go to
>www.freesco.org and you can build a Cisco 2500 with Linux. Think they have
>hardware specs and all, but it's pretty cheap as I recall.

Wow. Gotta love this open source stuff. Still, I think it was the 
shiny box that I not-so-secretly wanted. :) I also thought it would 
scare the animals away from lying all over everything that's heat 
sensitive. I found the fattest one sitting on a laptop keyboard the 
other day, licking away at herself and everything within range. Pity 
about the document I was editing in Vi, but...

>File storage - unless you're really into something that needs more
>dependability, I'd put multiple cheap IDE drives in your server and do a
>software RAID (if it's NT, you're home free.) Not perfect, not as fast as
>hardware, but cheap and easy to config and maintain. (NB: don't do this in a
>real office unless you really have to. A real setup should be SCSI drives
>with a hardware RAID 5 or 1+0, or you'll be sorry.)

I thought that the IDE bus specs made RAID more or less impossible? 
Isn't it limited to one instruction at a time per bus? I've heard of 
IDE RAID cards, but AFAICS what's the point?

>Backup? Oh; yeah. I remember backups. If I had a backup system (NINE
>computers? Who's the nut with NINE computers?) I would get a tape drive
>(don't know about hardware) but if 1) you want cheap and 2) you don't have
>huge amounts of data, use your favorite compression tool (you actually PAY
>for WinZip, don't you? $29 for one of the most useful Windows tools ever)
>and zip it onto a Zip disk. If you even get 1.5-1 compression, you can get
>750 meg on two of the new Zip disks.

I read the marketing gumf on OnStream, and it looks like a really 
impressive, cost-effective, backup system. Have you had a play with a 
real one?

Cheers for the UPS tip too!

Andrew



-- 
Andrew Forsberg
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