I'm using a TP-Link WDN3800. I didn't bother with installing the software. Just downloaded the Atheros drivers. It connects quickly, and stays connected.
Motorola and Arris are generally good bets. With Comcast, I'm using a Arris CM820 that I bought refurbed off ebay a few months back, for a whole $30 shipped.
Probably your best bet is going to be fixed wireless. The hard part can sometimes be finding one that serves your area, as they tend to spend little on advertising.
Instead of using NFS, I would stream the disk image over an SSH tunnel from the VPS. Here's a guide on it, https://www.pantz.org/software/dd/drivecopywithsshanddd.html, though searching for "dd over ssh" will find other examples.
Depends. If the provider offers IPMI or remote console access, this is do-able. You don't even need virtual media support for it. You could have GRUB boot a live OS (run from RAM) using memdisk. Then from within that, overwrite the disk. I've done it in the past, where I had GRUB boot up mfsbsd...
We've had decent luck with Dell Precision. But, for the most part we opt for Supermicro systems built by a local vendor, as they offer more for the money, and quicker support.
Having lived in places with a bunch of ISP choices, it's not always great. Only one bothered to offer faster and faster speeds, the local cable provider. Local telco reduced their speed offerings down to 3Mb (they had ADSL2 DSLAMs so they could offer up to 24Mb), and the other local ISPs...
For commuting, don't forget there are some excellent commuter bus routes from the suburbs into Seattle. I commute daily from Everett to the U district, and it's typically a 40 minute ride from the park and ride to a few blocks from my office. Then again, I head into work around 7AM, so it's the...
At home, I've got 8GB. I hit it occasionally when running VMs. At work, with 64GB I've regularly used over 40GB not counting memory allocated to caching. But, I often have 8+ VMs running at work.
1) The 6x SSDs will be way faster. Several times faster.
2) SSDs are fine in servers, so long as they are server or enterprise grade.
3) Link aggregation works so long as you have multiple hosts accessing the NFS server.
Pretty typical in the US. Most of our office machines are Core2Duos with 4 - 8GB of RAM and some low-end graphics card to handle two monitors. That said, anyone doing graphics or data analysis has a much more powerful machine.
Maybe they play games in their office? Or do GPU computing?
That said, I'd never use in house builds for company machines. Nothing beats only having to spend 15 - 20 minutes to diagnose, then to have a tech show up next day to fix the problem.
If you run KVM/Qemu you don't have to run as root. On my Debian VM host, libvirt by default runs VMs as libvirt-qemu, Red Hat doesn't use root either. In fact, you could run the VMs as any user so long as the user has permission on /dev/kvm.
Bah, tried to edit my post, but the forum keeps redirecting me to a reply window after entering my edit.
Anyway, you could skip the Kerberos. It's not needed for LDAP with NFS. It does improve security though.
That said for clustering, GFS and OCFS2 are popular options. Cluster LVM is also an...
You shouldn't have any issues. I've had no problems running Linux on Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge systems.
At work, I run Ubuntu 13.10 on a Dual Xeon E5 with a Supermicro X9Dia motherboard. System is rock stable, and everything works.
http://dns.he.net/, it's free. Signup and switch your domain to their name servers. Or, as others mentioned use a registrar which offers it, like Namecheap.
Laser, it's the only way to go. For B&W laser, cheap is fine, I've got a Brother HL2240 which was $50 on sale, works good. If you want color, look into a small workgroup model. I've always had good luck with HP in that area.
It may not require a permit. However, if they aren't the owner of the building, local regulations may require the work be performed by a licensed electrician.