A few months ago I started building a new computer for educational purposes. I started it up and installed ESXi a few weeks ago and found it worked almost perfectly. The problem was that I didn’t have big enough hard drives for it. About a month ago now I bought new drives and installed ESXi again, and built some new virtual machines.

It’s been working perfectly now for about a week with the new stuff and I keep trying different things. So far I have:

• Built a basic Debian machine to replace the old P3 that has been running faithfully for the last 5 years.
• Built an Ubuntu machine which is running integrated DHCP/DNS servers.
• Built a Gentoo machine (including configuring and compiling my own Linux kernel!) which is running Cacti with Apache, PHP and MySQL and getting statistics from all of my Linux systems via SNMP.
• Built a CentOS machine which is destined to be a transparent proxy to try and help our internet speed.

My current project is building a Linux-from-scratch machine. It probably won’t live particularly long after the goal is complete, but using only a Knoppix disc I intend to compile a working Linux system with everything I need to run a web-application (probably WordPress, just for fun).

One of my goals for the near future is to build a working Windows Server and connect some clients to it as a small Active Directory network.

Then I can move on to working with managed networking with the Cisco switch 😉