MacGyver Moments
- by Geoff N. Hiten
Denny Cherry tagged me to write about my best MacGyver Moment. Usually I ignore blogosphere fluff and just use this space to write what I think is important. However, #MVP10 just ended and I have a stronger sense of community. Besides, where else would I mention my second best Macgyver moment was making a BIOS jumper out of a soda can. Aluminum is conductive and I didn't have any real jumpers lying around.
My best moment is probably my entire home computer network.
Every system but one is hand-built, usually cobbled together out of spare parts and 'adapted' from its original purpose.
My Primary Domain Controller is a Dell 2300. The Service Tag indicates it was shipped to the original owner in 1999. Box has a PERC/1 RAID controller. I acquired this from a previous employer for $50. It runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. Does DNS, DHCP, and RADIUS services as a bonus. RADIUS authentication is used for VPN and Wireless access. It is nice to sign in once and be done with it.
The Secondary Domain Controller is an old desktop. Dual P-III 933 with some extra drives.
My VPN box is a P-II 250 with 384MB of RAM and a 21 GB hard drive. I did a P-to-V to my Hyper-V box a year or so ago and retired the hardware again. Dynamic DNS lets me connect no matter how often Comcast shuffles my IP.
The Hyper-V box is a desktop system with 8GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 5000+ processor. Cost me less than $500 to put together nearly two years ago. I reasoned that if Vista and Windows 2008 were the same code then Vista 64-bit certified meant the drivers for Vista would load into Windows 2008. Turns out I was right.
Later I added three 1TB drives but wasn't too happy with how that turned out. I recovered two of the drives yesterday and am building an iSCSI storage unit. (Much thanks to Starwind. Great product). I am using an old AMD 1.1GhZ box with 1.5 GB RAM (cobbled together from three old PCs) as my storave server.
The Hyper-V box is slated for an OS rebuild to 2008 R2 once I get the storage system worked out. maybe in a week or two.
A couple of DLink Gigabit switches ties everything together.
Add in the Vonage box, the three PCs, the Wireless-N Access Point, the two notebooks and the XBox and you have gone from MacGyver to darn near Rube Goldberg.
The only thing I really spend money on is power supplies and fans. I buy top-of-the-line for both.
I even pull and crimp my own cables.
Oh, and if my kids hose up a PC, I have all of their data on a server elsewhere. Every PC and laptop is pretty much interchangable for email and basic workstation tasks. That helps a lot too.
Of course I will tag SQLVariant.
