gimlet wrote:J'Kla wrote:I am looking at a home shard a small server to support two or three users operating on a domestic router. From my experience so far the shard is the easy bit.

At the moment, the shard and the client still have to reside on physically separate machines, right? Not implemented as separate programs needing perhaps a dual core processor or something like that so both client and server(s) can run on a single motherboard?
There is no such restriction. Client and servers are independent processes, they send messages to each other using whatever IP address and port you assign to them. If your PC is powerful enough, you can run the client and all servers on it. The IP address for all servers could simply be "localhost", or 127.0.0.1.
For a more flexible and scalable architecture, you could also use VMWare and run each server in a virtual machine. Each would have its own IP, thus it would be easy to adapt to whatever hardware you have on hand. For instance, you could have a distributed architecture, with you running the auth and game servers, and friends running data servers with the Age files distributed among them.