The home network I'm trying to build is still missing one important piece of hardware.. tape backup. Tonight I found an incredible deal on ebay: An internal 40/80 GB Quantum DLT4000 drive for $37 US, with 15 tapes including 3 cleaning tapes. Shipped, the total was $76 US. I also bought an $8 Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI controller, a SCSI cable and terminator. The total, shipped is $135 CAN! I couldn't believe it. The drive itself was probably over $700 new and it's only a few years old. The seller says it was used very lightly, maybe only three times.

It's all compatible with Solaris 10, in case I want to change the server's OS in the future (from Ubuntu Server).

The only concern I have is that it might be a 20/40 GB drive, not a 40/80 GB. I read a few places mention that the DLT4000 is a 20/40 GB drive. The auction says it comes with all of those 40/80 GB tapes. Those are expensive; I can't imagine someone accidentally buying that many tapes the wrong size. Either way, it doesn't matter to me. I probably have less than 1 GB of data to back up for now.

The network I'm creating looks like this:

sv01 (internal)

• Ubuntu Server
• OpenLDAP directory server
• BIND dns server
• Samba file server/print server
• CUPS print server (for use by Samba)
• Bacula tape backup server for whole network
• SSH secure shell
• SFTP secure ftp

sv02 (external)

• Sun Solaris 10
• Collab.Net collaboration suite (similar to sourceforge.net)
• Scalix mail and calendar server (MS exchange clone for linux, and web client)
• Centric CRM
• JRoller for my blog
• Postgres database for the various systems

All of the software on sv02 will authenticate with OpenLDAP on sv01. I can create an account once, and when you change your password it takes effect on all systems. Collab.Net and Scalix both *must* be installed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so they will go in a Solaris container for Linux which is compatible with RHEL v3.