Home Network

I currently am using my old PIII machine stored in my closet as a file and print server. It's plenty of power for what I need, but it doesn't support SATA and other modern protocols, so I can't load it up with disk space. I was originally thinking about replacing it with a home NAS, but Justin Lin convinced me otherwise. He convinced me to virtualize my workstation (an Athlon machine) instead.

Here's what I'm going to do:

• Upgrade the RAM. My Dell Inspiron 531 currently has 2GB RAM and it can take 4GB.
• Add two 1TB drives to be setup as a single RAID1 1TB drive. I bought two Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives from NewEgg for a great price ($90 each). Hope these work in my Dell!
• Run barebones Linux as the host OS, set up the disks using software RAID, and install VMware Workstation on top of that.
• Set up three VMs:
  • File server (256MB RAM, 800GB data) running OpenFiler.
  • Ubuntu workstation
  • Windows workstation

This would be significantly cheaper, since I would only need one computer (not including laptop), both from hardware and power savings.

I still need to figure out what to do about my printer. I could either move my printer into my room, buy a wireless printer server, or buy a new wireless printer.