Nancy is back up and running, although you couldn’t tell from outside the house at the moment. I have her set up and plugged in within the confines of my little office, which will be her home for a good long while I hope.

I have picked up a new server as well. I don’t know what I will name her yet, but it needs to be something that implies heft. She is a heavy sombitch. Not exactly the most useful at this point either. She doesn’t have any hard drives (or hot swap UW SCSI bays for that matter), half as many cpus as I was expecting, only a gig of memory, and doesn’t like booting off of a Ubuntu live CD. And heavy. Bugger all heavy. And she dims the lights when I kick her on. Sweet.

I don’t think the lack of parallel CPUs will really be a problem, and in the role she is going to fill might actually be a decent idea. She isn’t going to be doing many things in parallel anyways. She is going to be doing things that are by nature serial, but speed in doing those things is valuable. The only thing that doesn’t line up in this is putting both the web server and DB server on her at the same time. When someone requests a page load, it hits the database as well. I might look into keeping the web service on nancy, and just offload the DB onto the new gal. Or maybe put up a reverse proxy on nancy and just feed her with static pages to serve to the public, composed and built by the new server behind her. That might be a better solution over all actually. Just more convoluted in setup, and using stuff I haven’t played with yet. A chance to learn new things? Sweet!

If anything, I think newb might become my heavy lifter, and file server. Nancy will retain firewall and PBX duties, but relinquish primary web server, email server, and database server to the newbie. Since she has so many hot-swap drive bays, I think putting the newbie in place as my network storage and media server would work out well too. Get a pair of fast SCSI drives to mirror into her boot volume, and fill the rest of her bays with large slow drives in a stripe set. NFS and/or Samba for sharing the volumes with the computers, and some media sharing service to pump all my music and movies to the TVs. Sounds like a plan is coming together doesn’t it?

I hope to have some pictures of the new place up soon. I need to get my Aperture library off of an external HD before I can process the pictures I have taken already. Cassandra took some with her phone and uploaded them to FB, but that doesn’t really do this view justice. Hell, putting a Hasslblad up here wouldn’t do this view justice, but getting some higher quality ones from the ol’ 5D couldn’t hurt could it?