In NH property tax is the primary tax paid. States have various schemes to help lower and medium income residents afford to own homes. In NY for instance there is the STAR credit which provides a discount only on a primary residence with income limits. You must be a resident (pay NY income taxes) and donâ(TM)t get the credit on a second vacation/rental/investment property. âoeIf you are registered for the STAR credit, the Tax Department will send you a STAR check in the mail each year. You can use the check to pay your school taxes. You can receive the STAR credit if you own your home and it's your primary residence and the combined income of the owners and the ownersâ(TM) spouses is $500,000 or less.âoe https://www.tax.ny.gov/star/

I left Rochester, NY early in my IT career to move to Boston when Kodak started falling apart and the job market was awash with experienced unemployed engineers with Masters degrees. The economy hurt for a number of years after that, but many of those engineers created small businesses and the availability of talent attracted some new employers to the area. After living in Boston for 12 years I decided to move back when my (now) wife and I decided to get married and have kids.

Rochester, NY has a lot going for it now. I'm an experienced Sysadmin and had little difficulty finding a job. I'm regularly contacted by recruiters for other positions so I know there is still demand. I know some people will scoff at that so I feel I must also say these are not crappy mass-mailing recruiters as was so often the case in Boston. Of the four jobs I entertained from these recruiters in the past three years I had reasonable offers from three and I now work in one of those positions.

The non-tech good:

Housing is very inexpensive and you can choose either urban or suburban living and expect a less than a 30 minute commute time either way. My commute is under 20 minutes as are the commutes of the majority of my coworkers. Want a house for $100,000 in a decent neighborhood? No problem. Want to live in the best school district (Pittsford) in upstate NY? Average house prices are currently $265,000. Want to live in the country? You can do that too and still get to most workplaces in what is considered a normal commute time in most tech cities.

There's lots to do in town and nearby. There are many nice museums: The Strong National Museum of Play, The Rochester Museum and Science Center, The George Eastman Museum and many others. Like music? The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra is spectacular. That and the George Eastman School of Music also attract a lot of travelling shows. I went to see Video Games Live and Final Fantasy: Distant Worlds play with the RPO in the past year at very reasonable prices. Like good beer and wine? There are a ton of local breweries and wineries. You can get to the finger lakes in 1-2 hours for recreation including wine and beer tours, spectacular waterfall hiking (there's an entire book dedicated to it with over 100 waterfalls), touring quaint towns and visiting seasonal festivals. Niagara Falls and Letchworth Park are also within 90 minutes. You may notice all of the water I keep mentioning. Rochester is on Lake Ontario, one of the great lakes and we get a lot of rain to fill our lakes and streams. I think this is a good thing. You won't ever need to water your lawn, should you choose to have one, and there will never be a water shortage here as is becoming common in many cities.

The bad:

Weather: This is a good and a bad. Our late spring, summer and early fall are beautiful with temperatures that let you enjoy the outdoors when it is at its best, but it gets pretty cold here about six months of the year and below freezing for three to four of those every year. Oh, and we get snow. Nothing like the nightmare snowfall you may have heard about in Buffalo last year, but we get ~100 inches of fresh snowfall on average. That doesn't mean we have 100 inches of snow come spring though. Periodic melts and packing down usually give us a maximum depth of 2-3 feet of snow over the course of the winter.

Public Transportation: This is one of the things I miss most about Boston. You will need to own a car to do a lot of the above. We have a bus system, but it's a hub and spoke system and I would classify it as OK at best. It's not all bad though. We have a good road system that can handle the number of cars around so you'll rarely hit any real traffic.

I love living here. If you can put up with the winter weather and don't mind that you have to drive most places it is a great place to live.

Virtualizing disk to disk backup servers is great. You get the same benefits of simple hardware upgrades/maintenance/redundancy that you do from virtualizing everything else. Also when your backup targets are running on the same virtualization host as the backup server your network traffic never leaves the host which can result in transfer speeds faster than your network fabric. Just don't store your virtual backup server on the same data subsystem as the backup targets if you care about disaster recovery.

That hasn't been my experience with Comcast in Boston. They upgraded all of their infrastructure in Eastern Massachusetts to DOCSIS3 two years ago and my connection speeds went overnight from about 6/1Mbps to 22/3.5Mbps with no price increases. I haven't noticed any drops in speed during peak periods so they seem to have enough back end bandwidth provisioned. If I was willing to pay more they offer up to 100/10Mbps connections. ADSL1, with much higher latency and 3.0/768 speeds or commercial oriented symmetrical circuits with $500+ price tags are my only other options so they weren't exactly driven to this by the competition. Verizon has unfortunately not followed suit. A few towns in the area offer FiOS, but not many, and Verizon has halted its expansion.

This still need to get through the senate intact and be approved by the President before it is of any consequence.

From http://www.rules.house.gov/POP/approps_proc.htm:

Congressional action on an appropriation measure is not complete until both the House and Senate have successfully disposed of all amendments between the Houses eventually agreeing on an identical text pursuant to the Constitution - at which point the President acts on the bill.

We use Cygwin's rsync to backup windows servers over a slow Internet connection at work. It works very well for us and using the -z compression option will probably result in much faster transmission over a 2Mbit pipe than FTP will provide. We run rsync as a service on the source and pull to the destination using the rsync command line tool, but you could easily reverse that. You should also consider Microsoft's built-in DFS replication which automates replication of data between two file servers over TCP.

Puppet only supports Ubuntu as a side effect of supporting Debian. If the poster is going to use Ubuntu they should review these warnings when considering Puppet.

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetUbuntu

You may want to look at Landscape from Canonical (the driving force behind Ubuntu). For a direct comparison to Microsoft products it is a mix of features from Group Policy, SCOM, and SUS. It is decidedly not free with prices as high as $150 per client, but they offer volume discounts.

http://www.canonical.com/projects/landscape
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/news/landscape

For Desktops using a variety of hard drives may reduce the likelihood of concurrent failures, but with servers which utilize RAID using a variety of disks is rarely an option. Most RAID sets either require or benefit greatly from having identical disks. For example: In a simple RAID 1 set having different geometries often means that even though data may not be lost the server will be unable to boot if the primary disk fails.