Jelle Druyts

A few months ago, they were throwing out old machines at work at roughly the same price as 5 classic DVD's, so I figured "Hey, more pc's is always better" and dedicated it to collect some dust at my place. No high specs on it, just your basic Dell Dimension XPS D333 (which is a Pentium II 233 Mhz) with 256 MB of RAM. So maybe it can't render Finding Nemo but it should be able to run calc.exe, right?

At the time, my main pc (a Dell Dimension 4400) was jacked in to the internet through an ADSL modem, running a webserver (Apache and PHP), FTP Server (BulletProof FTP Server), SyGate Home Network to make it act as a DHCP server and NAT router and CiDial to keep my ADSL connection online. Oh and if by any chance there were any remaining CPU cycles, I occasionally wanted to use my pc as well - basically to check my email Furthermore, my home network wasn't really a home network: my laptop from work was jacked straight into my pc using a crosscable, and SyGate made sure it got an IP address and could go online.

So anyway, I was getting tired of never allowing myself to reboot my home pc ("Thou shalt not willingly slay thy uptime!"). Furthermore, SyGate interfered with my ADSL modem driver so I couldn't keep it running at all times because it would cause the whole pc to hang occasionally - needing a manual reboot ("The uptime! Mind the uptime!"), which is also not too good for my hardware. (I've already suffered a hard disk crash once and I'm not too keen on repeating that recovery process.) So if I wanted to go online with my laptop, that meant starting SyGate and when done, hopefully remembering to shut it down again (or risk suffering the manual reboot when it hung). And finally, I actually wanted to change my blogging engine (Nucleus) in favor of dasBlog - which has more features like Trackbacks and Referrals.

So the setup was pretty crappy, and I set out to change all that: use the cheap Dell as an all-in-one server (DHCP, NAT, IIS, PHP, ASP.NET, ...) on an actual LAN with a hub and ultimately get my home pc back - for checking my email a little faster But more on that later in step 2...