If you are building from scratch I can't speak highly enough of running Cat6 to everywhere and multiple points in each room, you will regret it later if you don't.
The box itself runs Linux as it's OS (Ubuntu at the moment) and I can simply SSH into it from wherever I happen to be.
Once on there you can open a .net file like you would on any other Dynamips/Dynagen/GNS3 system and the world is your Oyster :)
They are Sun HME quad NIC's they are PCI-X but work ok in regular PCI slots, another issue is that if you use them on a 64-bit kernel with more than 4GB RAM the kernel needs to be patched but apart from that they are pretty decent.
I managed to get hold of 3 of them for £45 but the price of...
Just finished sorting out my Cisco rack....
Old rack:
New rack:
I've gotten rid of the real routers and replaced them with a quad-core 8GB dynamips box with 3 quad NIC's to bridge to real switches.
I still need to swap the 2950's out for something newer (probably 3560's) and get another...
Yes, but when I bought the pod GNS3 was a little less stable than it is now and I could never get more than 2 routers to stay stable for longer than like 10mins