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

[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.