My Home Setup

OK, so I know a couple of weeks ago I wrote about Mandriva getting all the love, but I had multiple issue getting the wireless card working. I couldn't even make work using ndiswrapper... I don't, something to do with the particular wireless card in my machine. Anyway, I made the decision to go back to Ubuntu for my home computers. So my Dell 700m is running Ubuntu Studio, which looks BEAUTIFUL on the 700's screen by the way, and Ubuntu 7.10 is running on my "primary" laptop, the Dell Latitude D620.

I addition, I converted the VMWare Server box (Dell GC 280, Ubuntu Server 7.10) into an Xubuntu box and removed VMS for now. I don't have enough hard drive capacity for that system to serve as my VMS box for two Win2K3 servers.

So here's my hardware profile:

- Dell PE 600 SC - Win2K3 (My DC)
- Dell PE 600 SC - Win2K3 (My File, Email, and Web Server)
- Dell Latitude D620 - Ubuntu 7.10 (My "main" laptop)
- Dell Latitude D620 - WinXP (My "video studio" laptop - i.e. Adobe Premier, CS2, etc.)
- Dell Latitude 700m - Ubuntu Studio (My new "video studio" laptop that I'm still learning)
- Dell Optiplex GX280 - WinXP (My son's "desktop")
- - Running VirtualBox
- - - Running Dyne:Bolic
- Dell Optiplex GX280 - FreeNAS (My über NAS)
- Dell Optiplex GX280 - Xubuntu 7.10 (My main "desktop")
- Nokia n770 Internet Tablet - Nokia's custom Debian system (This actually belongs to work, I'm just borrowing it for some testing)
- Samsung Q1 UMPC - WinXP MPCE (Again, belong's to work)
Barracuda Web Firewall 210 - Vyetta (The open source router I'm currently playing with).

In addition, my wife has another 700m, I have a non-working Dell XPS (I really need to send it in before the warranty expires!), and my cousin is borrowing a couple of older Latitudes, several other 600SC's, a GX280, and a couple of 500 SC's as well - I should give it all to him and let him have a good time instead saying "borrowing", I sure don't need them.

I don't even want to go into what I run at work all day: 40+ Dell servers running Windows, Red Hat, ESX, Debian, etc..., 2 Cisco Pix 515's, Cisco ASA, Cisco Cat 4507 &4506, Cicso VOIP phone system, two Dell D620 laptops with Vista Ultimate and Mandriva 2008 PP with KDE respectively, and so on, and so on, and so on!

So what does all this mean? It means I need to figure out what the heck I want to do and consolidate! I have 7 computers running at any given hour of the day! Here's what I'm thinking...

I'll use my D620 primary laptop for most of what I do. Learn more about the Ubuntu Studio product so I can convert to other D620 to U-Studio - giving me a dedicated studio machine, but in a Linux environment. Maybe load Dyne:Bolic on the 700m, and Slackware on the XPS (once I get it fixed). Probably 86 the GX280 personal desktop (Xubuntu) and use it as a "test load" machine - keeping it in the garage. Keep my son's GX280, but load Vista (he'd get a kick out of that!), but remove VirtualBox. Keep the FreeNAS server, of course. And finally, build a single, custom, quiet box to act as my server, install Xubuntu on it wiht VMS 2.x and convert my existing boxes.

Wow! That's a lot of work. But I'm still not done. Once I get the Vyetta server configured, I'll put that in my home NOC/DC and then probably re-route some of my wiring so I can put all of the headless boxes in the closet. You know, I think I to develop a project plan for this... Hmmmmm......