Let's Build a Home lab

[DRF138]

I thought this might be a good thread to start, I have a small home lab, that leaves a bit to be desired (it just happened-?big bang theroy?)
so lets create one or more-
Let's talk low cost, Mid-range,High-end

I'll begin with stating the obvious-
1. Unless you are single with no children the following places are not feasible to have/begin building your home lab: the kitchen,master bedroom, or anywhere that is a high traffic area of your house,-you need to find at the very least a private/semi-private, clean,dry place to work,a little heat is nice too...

[John Prophet]

A few comps, a hub..or broadband and a router with built in switch.

Practice your networking, sharing files etc. If you are going to go for IT staff type work, learn how to create/delete user accounts and work with permissions.

Practice having the machines backup stuff to each other.

One hint might be to have images of the comps made using norton ghost....that way you can fiddle with the machines all you want, try different settings, registry hacks, software, etc..and when you go to far, throw in the ghost image and start all over..big time saver.

JP

[Gait_Keeper]

ah um........well...........er.............you see...........mmm.........oh........


you don't mean an illegal lab...........er designer drugs and.........stuff............um.......I had to ask........well..........

[John Prophet]

illegal lab? is that like a golden retriever with no Id tag?

[nukes]

If it were me, I'd build a set of machines (4 or 5) with cheap mobos (eg K7S5A or low-end MSI boards) with XP1700s or so as the CPU. This comes to about £60. Then a cheap graphics card (about £10) and about 256mb SDR ram (about £30. )
Then finally some 10-20gb hard disks.
These machines will also be able to get set up as a cluster or anything really. Them all being the same config helps as you can just copy one hard disk straight onto another.
If you want a better server, just build one with more expensive parts