I have a plan.

I’ve had a ‘home network’ for a while now. But it isn’t much of a network. Mostly a few PC’s and a couple of wireless laptops connected the internet. Throw in a few network printers for good measure and you get the picture.

This doesn’t really cut it for the geek in me. And to tell you the truth, it’s not really working as well as it should for the rest of us either. What we need here is a real network. Luckily, I know I network engineer. (It’s me. Really. I don’t need to find any one else.)

What I have is one P4 Desktop, 3 P3 Desktops, 2 laptops and one 200GB external drive . The plan is this. Take one P3 and make it a w2k3 Server and attach the external drive to it. One of the other P3s is already set up to be a VM Server. I will add a Ubuntu LAMP Server VM and a Windows XP VM. THe final P3 will be set up with EDUbuntu for the kids. My P4 desktop will be formated and I’ll install Kubuntu on it. The laptops are already good to go.

I’ll share out some folders from the external drive. The Printers too.

And then I’ll be set. I’ll be able to work from either my desktop or my laptop equally, my wife will be able to access my MP3’s and I’ll have the XP VM to fall back on if I find something that just needs windows (or the kids do.) I’ll use the LAMP server to work on some PHP/MySQL databases. You know for all that important data I have. Seriously, I see full relational databases in the future for my comic book collection and my movie library.

Why? Cause I’m a geek that’s why.

I’ll bore you with updates as they are available.