home officeI’m on the road quite a bit at various client sites and spend very little time at the office. So, most of my IT resources are at my home office for my paperwork along with support for my road warrior needs with comms, remote file access, etc.

I use to run a personal server farm for my web and email hosting needs, along with running a listserver on a dedicated server. 5 servers running Linux with RAID 1 array, a main web and email server for my various sites, a dedicated listserver, 2 backup servers identical to the 2 main ones and 1 server as my sandbox for testing server apps and patches before I installed them on the live ones.

home servversA separate upgraded broadband line was dedicated to the servers, which also was a backup for the main house broadband line from a different provider. I ended up spending so much time with the IT needs of the servers, patches, upgrades, battling hackers (which was actually fun and very educational/revealing), that I ended up migrating all of my server stuff to a professional webhost. A lot less headaches, but the huge drawback was the lack of root access to the servers and the mediocre tech support I’ve occasionally encountered.

BTW, I’m not an IT guy by profession; this was just something I felt like doing on my own. Can’t think of a better way to learn about the web, web/email servers, security, hacking and exploits.