Eyebrows ask why? The answer is nebulous, but having something to do with a desire to know and do for myself. If I was more of a car guy, this would be the Jaguar XKE I'm slowly building in my garage. So the challenge continues.
So far I've gotten a sweet Dell PowerEdge 2950. I picked up for a modest $165. Not bad for two processors, four cores each running 2.66GHz. 16GB Ram, redundant power supply and six drive bays. It's loud and obnoxious which is the worst part and it doesn't boot very well from USB. Fortunately I haven't upgraded my Mac Mini and so will leave it so that I can continue to burn DVDs. Last weekend I made a successful load of Proxmox 4.3 VE. It recognized everything and I was able to admin remotely. My first VM was CentOS7 and that was also troublesome getting going, but worth it. Next I installed Kali2, but that install failed. I'll give it another shot locally on VMWare on my main workstation to see how it should work. I have gotten the live version working a couple times - enough to check out the MATE desktop, which is fair. I ran a couple utils but they seemed to just sit there. Next time.
Today I flipped on the MD1000. There are no drives in the bays but that will come in January. I am quite pleased to know that the Dell PERC 6/E adapter is the one that I need to install in order to get all that working properly. I found a new one on Amazon for $85 bucks. The MD1000 is relatively quiet as compared to the PowerEdge. So I'm thinking that I may just hook it up to a quiet tower as a permanent storage solution I can keep spinning - or not.
The next step is putting together a VPN and a firewall that I can configure myself. That will harden up the homebase a little. In due time I'd like to host something more secure. I should learn the appropriate terms. I have a lot of network stuff to learn, and I expect that learning it the hard way on old hardware will make it very easy for me to understand what AWS makes easy for the world. It's a bit surprising to be on the thin side of my expertise, but that's the discipline. In a few months it will be even more fun.
Edison is already telling me that I spend way more money per month than my neighbors on power. Yeah well so long as I don't crash the circuit, I don't care.
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