Rather than hardware, I got some software for Christmas this year. Actually, I've had the software for a while, but lacked the time to learn how to use it, so I took the time today.
First was xen, which is great -- now I have many additional systems on my network, all without messing around with hardware. I'd tried to set up xen before and gave it up as needing too much work at the time, and while some of my systems, including kite, run as xen instances on systems adminned by others, I didn't feel I understood it well. Debian's xen support still has a few rough edges; I ran into issues with running out of loop devices, and was suprised that bridged networking wasn't set up by default. I also filed a lot of bugs on xen-tools (sorry Steve). But overall it wasn't particularly hard to get working, and I feel I understand it reasonably well now.
I even figured out how to get pygrub fixed and working, which is spiffy -- one of my issues with xen has always been that the choice of kernel is left up to the dom0 admin, and it's good to know that pygrub lets domU provide its own kernel.
Next up was SE Linux, which is another piece of tech I've had a general understanding of for a long time, but never deployed. Now that I can dedicate a system to playing with it, thanks to xen, there was no reason not to try it out, and while there are still rather too many manual steps, the instructions are clear and easy to follow, and the result seems to work ok.