[thechat] Home Office Equipment

[spinhead]

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.

UPS - buy Best Power. One of our engineers used to work there and has
extensive technical arguments why they're the best. APC only has the best
marketing campaign ;)

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.)

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.

spinhead


----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Forsberg" <andrew at thepander.co.nz>
To: <thechat at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 6:00 PM
Subject: [thechat] Home Office Equipment


> Hullo!
>
> I'm just dreaming up the list of stuff I want to buy next year, and
> was hoping some of you with extensive (NINE COMPUTER!!!!) home
> offices could recommend some non-cripplingly-expensive gear. The
> server stuff is all sorted, but what would people recommend for:
>
> a UPS
> a backup system
> network file storage
>
> I'd like to go the whole hog and get a lovely Cisco router ... but
> they scare me a bit. :-)
>
> Cheers
> Andrew
>
> --
> Andrew Forsberg
> ---
> uberNET - http://uber.net.nz/
> the pander - http://thepander.co.nz/
>