Some randomness

[greatbear]

Jeff goes to work, running the entire food service department, filling in as cooks and diet aides when short staffed and has to put in 12-14 hour days. He comes home, makes supper for us, after which we go grocery shopping. Once the goodies are all put away, Jeff relaxes before bedtime watching Hell's Kitchen. That's focus, people.

Today I ordered some goodies to begin the revamping of the IT infrastructure here at Haus des Großenbären. It's beyond time to retire the server that has been the heart of the intarweb goings-on. It will actually be replaced by two PCs, a fairly simple dual core machine with a pair of drives running RAID 1 and ECC RAM for reliability, dual gigabit ethernet, USB2 and Firewire connectivity, basic video and sound, and a robust power supply. This will be my router/gateway, web server and firewall wrapped up in a quiet, efficient package. The mobo, RAM, power supply and the video card should arrive in a few days, I have a case, processor, drives, opticals and the rest of the goodies needed to make it a living, breathing box. Once functional, it will take up residence in the basement where the old setup has been churning away nonstop for ten years. I am hoping this one works as well for as long.

Once all the data from the old server's eight drives(!) is backed up, it will be quietly shut down. I wont dismantle it, instead it will sit around for a while at least as a reminder of how much has changed for me in it's lifetime. The countless terabytes that have passed through it speak of some of the best times I have had, as well as the worst. Since early 95, when I hopped aboard the internet at home (at work it was all business) I quickly found a home, reaching out and making many new, wonderful friends from all over the world, as well as a few enemies. I built quite a few relationships, and, to be quite honest, racked up more tricks than I can recall. As online commerce began to take shape, I started buying more and more online. My entertainment, news, music and video has also passed through the old beast's network cards as well, leaving me to abandon most television and radio. So, it will be kinda tough to toss the server aside. for if it could talk, it would have some incredible stories to tell. Some of them, in some fashion, might still be on some of it's drives.

The yard is a lush, dense green, and with the warmer weather coming back, will be in severe need of mowing, trimming, weeding and planting. This Saturday Jeff and I will have a yard sale in an attempt to rid ourselves of some of the accumulated cruft, flotsam and jetsam we share. I might bring myself to put some of Mom's things out as well, if it does not hurt too much. For some of the better things, though, I want some of her friends to have whatever they can use. The rest will be given to various good causes she supported. That, I'm afraid, will rip me to pieces. It's like goodbye all over again.

Okay, enough rambling for now.

Comments

[budmassey.livejournal.com]

So what, other than surfing, do you do with your servers?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

The current server exists to deliver an internet connection among the other computers in the house as well as negotiate their interoperability. I did this before there were the simple wireless routers of today. It also acts as a printer server as well as a repository of backups and other files. It's also a web server I can log into from anywhere for access to my files. I had reduced it's role in recent years as the drives filled up and I took down the webpages and folder hosting out of security concerns. It's a creaky, old dual PII-333 machine that has been very reliable through the years, but what I want to do with it now is beyond it's capabilities. FOr one, I no longer want all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. I dont want to have one PC holding all my files and whatnot to be directly connected to the 'net. So, this PC will take over for the old one, but will be more than capable to run the webserver, etc, as well as run some of the home automation sort of things I want to implement. It will also be much less power hungry than the current PC. A separate media/fileserver will eventually built to accommodate the gigantic media library I have collected over the years, plus automated backups of all those files as well as the PCs Jeff and I use. I've digitized our movie and music collections, plus the always growing collections of photos and videos I shoot. It's a digital hell, I tell ya.

[jacked01.livejournal.com]

post and addy for the yard sale please when you have it im alway looking for flotsam

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I will, in a separate post. :)

As far as PC;s are concerned

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Since '95, I've had...

a 386-SX 20 MHz box w/ I forget now how many megs of RAM, running Win 3.1.
a 486-DX 33 MHz box w/ 32MB RAM of which I managed to eek out 64 or 72 MB RAM, had a 28.8 dialup modem, a 16 bit audio card, originally came w/ DOS, but my Dad had upgraded it to Win for workgroups 3.11, I then added Win95 and IE explorer 4, then became the slowest box after that when it was a semi decent box when I first got it

a P133 tower that was refurbished and had a new 33.6 modem(?) and Win95 lasted a year and a half before the IBM drive crapped out (I think it was one of those ceramic drives of the day - 1.6G at that). Had added a previous 16 audio card from previous 486 to add it for improved audio, added a used CD-R drive I bought from a friend to be able to make CD's.

Replaced that thing with an entirely new PC that I built myself w/ new case, 300W PSU, ASUS MB, 800MHz Athlon processor, 512MB RAM that I bought from a friend, added CD-ROM, 3.5" disket drive, the old CD-R, new, refurbished 17.2 WD Caviar drive, voila, a new PC! Now that same box has been severely upgraded/updated w/ crappy Foxconn MB (mATX at that), 2.8 P4 processor, 1G RAM, USB 2, 120G main drive, 500G external drive DVD/CD R/RW drive, the old CD-RW drive that I rarely use

And that's where I'm at now. No regrets shucking old, outdated, obsolete PC to the side for newer one to run what I need.

I do get semi nostalgic for older PC's from time to time tho.

Re: As far as PC;s are concerned

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I should add, when I did the upgade to current box, it started out as a 2G Celeron processor, which got replaced w/ the P4 I have in it now. Memory began life as 256MB, now 1G.

Re: As far as PC;s are concerned

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of the remnants of old past PCs, most are half cannibalized. One, a 12MHz 286 that I had crammed full of memory, hard drives and whatnot still exists intact. I want to take pics of the internals. Even back then I maxed out my PCs with hardware and went so far as to make my own custom interface cables to keep clutter down. They were always showpieces inside.

Re: As far as PC;s are concerned

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I was never quite that "bad" but I did max out that 486 to the point that on a good day, I can get to the home page on IE in less than what seemed like 3 minutes or more and add to that, the same thing for each and every page I went to.

It was that bad. So far, non of the PC's after it were quite that slow. ;-)

[jkusters]

... a fairly simple dual core machine with a pair of drives running RAID 1 and ECC RAM for reliability, dual gigabit ethernet, USB2 and Firewire connectivity, basic video and sound, and a robust power supply...

Tech porn! :-)

Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me... *evil grin*

JOhn.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

LOL

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

The desire to not have anything else on my perimeter box - and no need for any functionality like a web server - is why I built my new firewall/router out of that thin client box. It's running pfSense 1.2 beautifully - current uptime (since I stopped dinking with it ;) is 43+ days. ;) If anything, the wee box might be a bit overspec for pfSense - CPU usage generally runs around 5%, memory usage about 15%. Still, it's nice to have headroom...! It's been able to handle bittorrent connection loads that would have given my old router a stroke.

I'm currently running one P4-2.66GHz machine as my file server, bittorrent slucker and netcast aggregator, and another more compact one with only a single harddrive (but 2.5GB of ram ;) as my VMware host box. That latter is running Folding@Home to put to good use any CPU cycles I don't need for something else. (I'm a bit chary of running F@H constantly on my file server.)

So what are you planning to run on your new machine to handle your router/firewall/webserver/&c. duties?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

The old server has been running Win2k since the OS was released, believe it or not. I used IIS for the web serving duties and miserable little ICS for the routing. I didnt expect much, but it worked better than I had hoped. Only issue I ever had with it was a Nimda attack, once that was patched, it stayed solid. The logs are full of script kiddie attempts are getting into places they shouldnt without success.

To that end, I am probably going to use Server 2003, mainly because I know my way around. I had thought of making it a typical LAMP box, but I dunno. More fidgeting than I have patience for these days.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I am already becoming a pile of nerves over it. I am getting close to some sort of implosion over it. It's not gonna be pretty.