The Tech in a Sec retail location

this is my biggest undertaking since college. its probably not as big as that, but its close. Where do I begin? I got the store, the website, landlord and employees already. I just havent opened yet!

I'm waiting until aug 10 for my landlord, and I need to get some documentation to get everything rolling nicely along.

1. new york state Tax ID
2. Bank account in the businesse's name
3. letter of credit for international purchases
4. merchant account to accept credit transactions
5. POS system software and fully operational transaction database (wow)
6. Domain controller for the network
7. Liability insurance

I couldnt start on this tonight since I'm nocturnal and nothing's open... so I did what I could do, and got the Domain controller to work. Holy crap was that a nightmare with DNS... But its distributing addresses and sharing printers/files like a pro under windows 2003 server standard.

Any computer was going to work, so I used my very slowest one... a pentium II @ 350mhz from Q1 of 1998. It had a bad CD-ROM drive, floppy, hard drive and even the power button failed because it was caked with industrial sludge.

But I quickly replaced all those things with throw-away parts, and got it working on a refurb 40GB hdd using a cheap PCI RAID controller with its updated (2004) BIOS. I spliced the power button wires over to the unused reset button. This became the new power button.

Then I added a USB 2.0 controller from which the very large archive of ISO images, applets and other tools will be hosted on external hard drives totalling 2 TB. The controller also has two laser printers on a self-powered hub.

It distributes IP addresses, takes large print jobs, and authenticates in no time, all across the gigabit switch.

this useless piece of junk has been transformed into a worthy backbone for my business, but of course not without its many frustrated hours into the making.