/dev/blog0

For all of us that run our own home labs we know (or should know) the price of what it costs us to run our equipment every month. Previously I spent some time with a Kill-A-Watt meter performing an energy audit on my equipment and found that it uses about 650 watt/hrs of power. At 12 cents per kwh I’m spending $78/month on my lab, over $900/year. 60% of our monthly electric bill goes towards my work hobby.

I’ve tried to slim some servers down by moving them to a laptop running Debian & VMware Server but there are creep-cpu-usage problems involved with that. The laptop running VMware Server wasn’t all the beefy either, a Athlon 2800+ with 512mb of RAM. 1 or 2 guest OSs before things start to slow down. No RAID setup, no firewire, no expandability; a good stop-gap system until I could figure out what I wanted to do.

Through a lot of reading I’ve decided that an VMware ESXi system was the way to go if I wanted to virtualize my servers and have enough room left over to delve into Cisco Call-Managers, IDS/IPS systems, Nessus scanners, Asterisk, Olive’s, and just stand alone systems for trying new things. I also needed a NAS to centralize all the usb/firewire drives that I have laying about. The NAS needed to have RAID capabilities and act as an iSCSI target so I’ve chosen to go with FreeNAS. Read more…

Finished!

I had put my relay rack over the summer and slowly added parts to it. When I had to rewire the Cisco devices for study purposes or because I needed to change a computer out it was done with little regard to neatness (ie. sloppy is fast). I went from using the Costco special baker’s rack:

To a 7′ Chatsworth (that I got for free):

Read more…