Server

The best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry. Other matters required attention, and our move has been delayed. It could happen before July – even by this Wednesday.

The move to Denmark did not happen on schedule. However, much transition was done at the appointed time. The business side of MyDLL URTH is no longer on the AT&T pipe; the web server is already a redundant server and most service configurations have been scripted for the big move.

Stay tuned; good things are coming.

Our network is moving to Denmark, and it's an exciting time. Along the way, we are virtualizing everything.

Sure, a computer can easily be for removed from an operator. People do that all the time with web servers but, do they virtualize their engineers? We're doing that.

Imagine how many files are misnamed in manual intervention. One such error came today. Nearly 10% of a massive server upgrade file inventory were named googlehostedservice.htm and the missing "l" is a real show stopper.

It must be obvious to more than myself: the most attention-deprived people live with people who are trained at providing needed attention. How many spouses of automobile mechanics drive vehicles held together by baling wire and bungee cords? How many plumbers' children gleefully splash in puddles left by leaking outdoor spigots? How many roofers' homes are stocked with buckets to compensate leaking roofs? Certainly you understand what I'm saying.

For the record, I am guilty of the previously framed neglect. Our four-member household use no fewer than eight computers each day, and there is always something of those computers in bad repair. The XBox has a failing hard disk and play is somewhat unpredictable with two of the controllers. The public faces of MyDLL URTH (geek, mordor, and asylum) are so old that 1GB of PC-100 memory is more than can be appointed to the collective public interface. Number one (Yipeee) has the most modern computer at her disposal, and has shoe-horned Windows Vista into ZOO's 80GB hard disk and 1GB of RAM — nearly without assistance from the resident geek. Israfel has "upgraded" her Linux installation with Windows XP Professional — also with minimal support from the resident geek. That leaves the half-byte; Nibble inherited my old workstation after the lightning event — talk about baling wire and bungee cords …

The appropriately named mordor is gateway to URTH with routes to our home, phone, and public networks. There are six routes in all, which our ever-watchful Smaug jealously guards. Smaug tolerates light traffic through the gratis wireless route; of course, tribute does pave the road for heavier carriage. The public routes through mordor lead to wyrlds of URTH like our service interface and lazsoft; geek is there with many smaller wyrlds. Of course, our private wyrld is deep within Smaug's labrynth.

ZOO is a point of Yipeee's pride. ZOO and mordor met before My^DLLURTH emerged. They were differently adorned in that time, but they were the same in mind. ZOO resembles Smaug's congested lair; much accumulates there and that accumulation is regularly treasured. There have been equipment upgrades along the way. In fact, none of the original hardware of ZOO remains in service — even the case, keyboard and power cords are changed. There is more and faster RAM; there is more storage and different media transports; there have been a series of operating systems too. Vista will not be the last.

My old workstation could be appropriately named lazarus, but it continues designated as groathut. If you're thinking that name references a hobbit home, you couldn't be more wrong. A groat is a sterling fourpence; I am the old groat, and I always give more than my two cents worth. Groathut is where the old groat lived during first emergence of My^DLLURTH — only mordor and Yipeee's ZOO have longer histories. The old groat still visits groathut, but mostly it is where the groatlets play. Along the way, groathut has been a media server, a gaming computer, and a communication center. Unlike ZOO, groathut still uses the original hard drive, keyboard, and case; although the case has been slightly modified to accomodate other changes. Like ZOO, the power, memory, mainboard, and CPU are not original.

Enter geek! This syndication, of course, is made possible from geek. The hardware of geek was discarded from a Galax business center; I could not bear the certain disuse and gladly adopted our sandbox. Like the old groat, geek is a surprise to the unsuspecting visitor. It is only changed from the original Compaq ProLiant Series 4070 hardware configuration with a secondary above board NIC, but the Windows 2000 installation is replaced with a Linux 2.6.15-25-686 SMP kernel. The smaller wyrlds hosted in geek are numerous; they include this content management which is adapted from Drupal, a wiki farm which is adapted from MoinMoin, a crude start of a documentation server, and a few other surprises for later.

With four generations of friends and family spread over the North American continent, we need some means of traditional communication. URTH put a neglected 700MHz P-II to work first, as an Asterisk PBX, and later as a trixbox server. After configuring three toll-free DID trunks, and a few non-local DID trunks, local friends begin calling us the "little telco that could." The asylum server is a pure IP communication solution — including VoIP, e-mail, and IRC.

Of course, my own computer is a X-Terminal from which I utilize the processing power of a dozen or more servers (including mordor, geek, and asylum). I did build a nice workstation with a 250GB SATA-II drive, 1GB of PC-4200 RAM, an AMD Athlon 3800+, a 10/100 NIC, a gigabit NIC, on-board 5.1 sound controller, above board 7.1 sound controller, with the capability of four video feeds from on-board and above-board video controllers; but it became designated as the in-house media server before I could get very attached.

Did I mention a lightning strike? Yes! It passed directly through the wireless antenna farm on our roof and through the electrical wiring of our downtown location. Several thousand dollars of computer and telephone equipment in this block of Galax were destroyed; some equipment literally vaporized. We are recovering, but it is slow. Events, like that one, motivate some attention to household needs; but I think my supply of baling wire is getting low.