Acquiring Hardware

After obtaining my Dell R410, I started to realize just how much money I was throwing at this wild "dream" I had and said screw it and continued to dump money into this project aimlessly...

I had a friend who worked IT for a local company who was selling an R310, and I thought it would be PERFECT for a network operations server (Routing, DNS, VPN, etc.) and I immediately purchased it for the lab.

It was pretty bare-bones, 320GB HDD, 8GB of RAM, and one socket containing a Xeon X3460.

I got lucky, it also had iDRAC 6.0 for remote management, just like the R410!

Hell, the server even came with a free Avaya/Nortel switch! 48 ports and only 9 devices to attach to it! Overkill as hell, but why not! Too bad the interface was absolutely useless as it was written in Java.