My first experience with computers was the Sinclair ZX81. Writing a few simple programs and building a memory expansion module. This was superseeded by the BBC-B micro, carry on basic programming and building an eprom programmer for it.

When an affordable pc came to the home market, the Amstrad 1512 / 1640, due to the expense decided to build my own from bits and pieces. I used to attend Amateur Radio Rallies around the country and purchased component cards from out of scrap boxes. They would then be taken home, tested and if not working, repair them. That, in my opinion, was far better training that a formal course. Myself and a friend called Geoff, spent many evenings repairing the cards, building up a "goodies box". When surface mount and jungle chips came into common useage, this activity came to almost a halt, as repairing them was not practical.

The opportunity came up again to do project work, when reading a review of the program "Smoothwall", it stated as the software is free, and it will work on an old PC that may be in the loft - give it a try. It fulfilled the requirements of being cheap, feasable and must either be useful for self training or a suitable piece of equipment for a more permanant usage.

Smoothwall Version 2 was built, and a lot learnt about hardware firewalls, the logs giving some indication of the "nasty" internet activity. This was taken apart again as a PC running 24/7 at home is expensive.

The next project was "Freenas", a network storage device. That was in November 2006, and apart from buying two 250GB drives, the cost was free, and is in use today. There was one problem, an obscure fault on the motherboard.This would cause the power supply to self destruct - even if switched off but power connected. Changing the motherboard solved the problem. 

After that came the day when we took over the church website, and I therefore set up my old P3  using XP Pro, Apache webserver, together with a FTP server. This allowed local testing of web pages before go live.

My next project - albeit a longer term one - is for an intranet suitable for a small office or company. My experience of the BAA intranet showed me the good and not so good features.

The first step, is a web proxy server using "Squid". This has been built and basic rules for filtering applied. This would then be used for the Intranet project.

An Apache server has been built on a Ubuntu (linux) platform. The website is now using server side includes, and PHP, and has a message board, guest book and I am presently working on a picture presentation.
The next addition may be a "fault reporting" facility. This would be used as part the "intranet" project.