No, Bopo, you're right - I said it! /guilty
I do maintain my own EQEmu server on my LAN. I don't believe I used the Big Lan Book tutorial... but then again, I setup the server almost 3 mos ago and I can't remember... I read a bunch of posts before even attempting it - and even then it took about 4 hours for me to get it running. I tried to answer all my questions before I had them - it didn't really work out that way!
I have an AMD 2400, 512mb RAM, 30gb HD, 2mb video card
10/100 mb NIC running Win2K Pro... It's only job is a MySQL server and it hosts Minilogin, World and Zone. I play across my LAN on my personal machine (lol - better video card)...
I've had up to 15 people logged into my server - both in a single zone and in multiple zones (I usually run with PoK static and 5 dynamic zones since there's usually only about 5 of us and we're grouped). It gets slightly laggy about there, but no one complains (afterall, it's free! :P )
If you have a specific question, I'll be more than happy to try to point you in the right direction or provide an answer if I have it.
~Gandar