State of the Starport: digital denizens

[mdlbear]

So... as promised, here's the state of the Starport's silicon life-forms and their network ecosystem. In some ways it's not all that bad. In other ways it's awful.

Hardwarily we're in pretty good shape. My main workstation is an Intel Core2Duo; it could stand upgrading from 2GB of RAM to 4, but otherwise it's fine. The main fileserver, Nova, is an AMD Athlon 64X2. It also needs another 2GB of RAM, and unlike Dorsai has a slot open that I could drop a 2GB stick into. I've recently acquired a 1.5TB hard drive and new, quiet power supply for it.

So far Dorsai is the only machine running Lenny; I need to upgrade Nova and the router, which are currently running Etch.

My living-room machine is a 1GHz Thinkpad running Ubuntu; it needs a lighter-weight desktop and more RAM; after that it'll probably be OK.

Colleen's desktop machine in the bedroom doesn't boot at the moment; neither does the old HP that Kat gave me for the second machine in the office. Harmony, my old workstation, is currently out of service but there's nothing wrong that a quieter power supply and more RAM won't fix.

The most urgent task is upgrading Nova. Maybe tomorrow after I do the backups. (It'll take several days to do the whole upgrade, but I can at least get the new hardware installed and start copying the partitions that need copying.)

There's a certain amount of planning involved in figuring out how best to make use of 1.5TB of disk space -- and how to get by until I can get a similarly-huge mirror drive.

The router, along with needing an OS upgrade to Lenny, could stand a larger SATA drive in place of its 200GB IDE drive, but there's no hurry.

The network, in contrast, is in very bad shape indeed.

I got a shiny new AT&T U-verse net connection about a month and a half ago. It replaced the old DSL line that our email was coming in on. I have not set it up, and I'm currently getting mail via fetchmail. It isn't getting split properly -- it's all coming to me, spam and all. :( :P I was sort of waiting to order static IP for the new line before I set it up. Haven't. Fail, expensively.

Meanwhile I still have an advanced account at rahul.net (which is where theStarport.org's website, mail and DNS still live), and a DSL connection from sonic.net which is why I still have a web connection.

I think what I need to do is move thestarport.org lock, stock, and DNS, over to my web host at dreamhost. That, or get a cheaper and more flexible control-panel account at rahul. In either case I need to get the static IP set up (which requires a phone call -- you can do most things from the web, but that isn't one of them) and drop sonic.

Or, I suppose, drop Rahul and go back to hosting my own DNS and email, except that I'm tired of playing catch-up with the spammers. And somehow I suspect that Rahul does a better job of that than Dreamhost.

It would be nice to get enough of this done by the time Colleen comes home for her to come home to working, largely spam-free email. It would also be nice not to be paying for over $100/month worth of services we don't need.

Comments

[hsifyppah.livejournal.com]

Thought about you tonight at our housefilk! Naomi sang A Tribute to the Middle-Aged Bear and Callie played some video of the Tempered Glass concert from Consonance - Inherit the Earth, I think.

[mdlbear]

Yay!! What fun! Wish I could have been there too.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Might you be able to make use of anything found here (http://www.drak.net)?

[mdlbear]

I'll have to keep that in mind. So far I'm pretty happy with dreamhost, but it never hurts to have other options. More expensive, but I like their philosophy.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I've dealt with DrakNet for a long time. They are reliable, easy to use, and helpful. They are also pagan-, gay-, leftist-, feminist-, green-, and alternative-lifestyle-friendly. And they're cheap!

[mdlbear]

I meant that DrakNet seems more expensive, but has a philosophy I like. DH is $8/month for an unlimited account. There are some limits on what I can do with it, but space, bandwidth, virtual domains, email accounts, and ssh users are all effectively infinite. I believe lunarpages is similar.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Huh? I'm paying $5/month for a rock-bottom commercial website, which still has relatively huge amounts of space and bandwidth - I don't know how many virtual domains it covers, or how much email, because I'm not using those features. (Actually, I'm just keeping the account alive on spec; I was in the middle of setting up a complex website when I had a terrible attack of Real Life, which I'm still suffering from.)

[mdlbear]

Rock bottom won't work for me; I have about a dozen domains at the moment (not all active -- as you say, some are being kept on spec).