A friend of mine has found some good uses for hardware that was being thrown out…. rather prematurely I might add. It never ceases to amaze me what people throw out, and how much usefulness and life is often left in it.
One thing I’m doing with my own old hardware is outfitting them with PCI wireless cards and throwing them down in my basement so that I can add services to my network without further overloading my home office electrical circuit, or creating more noise by adding more spinning fans.
It’s also interesting to see how people’s home networks are shaping up. I set mine up quite some time ago and haven’t touched it too much. There’s a local caching DNS server that’s helped performance a bit. The same machine is also an NTP server to the other machines in the house, and (as naturally follows) a file server and log server to those same hosts.
I have yet to set up a centralized authentication scheme on my home network. I probably will set up and LDAP server at some point, but more because it would be great to have all of our addressbook data in an LDAP directory instead of me constantly trying to hunt down my wife’s address book.
Incidentally, this is my very first attempt at doing a blog ‘trackback’ :-) Hopefully, it works. My apologies if I goof it up.