Stuff The Rat Uses
I’m always curious what software and hardware other people use, so I thought I would leave this out here as a reference.
Laptop:
- Dell XPS 15 (9560)
- Intel Core i7-7700HQ
- 32 GB RAM
- 1TB NVMe SSD
Workstation:
- ASUS P8Z77 WS Motherboard
- Intel Xeon E3 1245 V2 Processor
- 4 x 8GB DDR3 1600M MHz Memory (32 GB Total)
- ASUS GeForce GTX 960
- 1 x 960 GB Sandisk Ultra2 SSD
- 2 x 2TB Hitachi 7200RPM HDDs
- 1 x 4TB Hitachi 7200RPM HDDs
- 2x Philips BDM4065UC 40″ 4K Monitors
Software:
- VMWare ESXi
- I use ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 for my test lab.
- VMWare Workstation
- I use Workstation for my local VM’s on my Windows workstation.
- Veeam Backup and Replication
- Used for backups of my ESXi-based test lab.
- SQL Backup and FTP
- Great little back-up utility for really simple automated SQL Server backups.
- DropBox
- Doesn’t everyone use this?
- UltraEdit
- Probably the best text editor available. It has a great tabbed interface and will open files that are many GB in seconds. I use it on both my Mac and Windows boxes.
- Notepad++
- If you don’t want to spend the money on UltraEdit, Notepad++ is the next best thing. The downside to Notepad++ is that there is no Mac version.
- Remote Desktop Manager
- There are a lot of options for remote desktop management. I’ve tried a variety of them, but I still prefer RDM the most. It has a great tabbed interface and stores passwords in a local encrypted file. It also has a Mac version and an import/export that works between Windows and Mac. While there is an Enterprise version with a client/server setup, I just use the regular version. It interfaces with Dropbox so that I have all of my connections on all of my computers.
- Splashtop Personal
- RDP works at some clients, but often times its blocked. Splashtop has yet to fail behind a single client firewall, though I’m sure I’ll eventually find a place that blocks it.
- SnagIt
- If you see a screenshot on this blog…it was taken with SnagIt. It has really simple tools to add annotations and borders. It also does a great job for Webinars.
- Rufus
- This is a great tool for creating bootable thumb drives. I won’t say I use it all the time, but if you are setting up a new server or reloading a laptop, it does a great job of creating bootable thumb drives in a hurry.
You should look into Nextcloud for self-hosting cloud storage.
Can you do a build guide on a mail server? Preferably something virtualized and linux based.
There are a lot of guides out there on doing a mail server. The biggest problem is that if you are hosting it at home, virtually all home ISP’s are blacklisted from e-mail hosting. Too much risk for spam if you didn’t configure your relay correctly.