A chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage, and a network server in every broom closet?

Like many (most?) home setups, the computer network here at ranchero indebto just seemed to grow on its own. Not that there was a complete lack of rhyme or reason, it’s more like there was no plan to build a network from the git-go. Things just followed a simple pattern of necessity. When it was time to add another computer, the box got unwrapped and plugged into the hub. When it was time to go wireless, I simply slapped in the Airport and off it flew.

(So smack me. I didn’t fire up a program to draw a network diagram. Heck, I didn’t even scratch it out on a napkin. I just plugged the stuff together.) :O

A Dell Computer catalog arrived in today’s snail mail. As I aimlessly flipped through the pages, it got me thinking …

I’m sitting here with a tangle of wires (yep, still no real cable management scheme), a maxed-out hub, and no central server.

It’s time to get serious about the network. Just not too serious. (Hey, I have lots of CDs to rip and miles to go before I sleep.)

In flipping through that Dell catalog, I came to the realization that it’s not necessary for me to go to the expense of a rack mount server. Well … not yet, at least. A roomy tower-case network server will do just fine.

The server has to have a monstrous hard drive setup. Okay, so maybe I don’t need terabytes of storage, but I definitely want a RAID array for backup and security. Of course, I’m hoping to cobble something together at a reasonable cost.

While my jaw dropped when I saw the low server prices in the Dell catalog, I really need to jump on their website to see how prices skyrocket once I start configuring a box to my specifications …

[tags]home network[/tags]