Printers and server updates

[mdlbear]

Important info for computer users at Grand Central Starport:

I've moved the HP inkjet printer to a different server: it's now on Nova (the same server as the laser printer). If you normally print to the laser printer you won't notice a change. The inkjet's URL is /nova:631/printers/ij.

Also note that I'll be using the tag "starport" for system-administration announcements from now on.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled geekery; casual users can stop reading at this point.

Having finally decided to find out whether Linux would handle two USB printers on the same machine, I tried it. It worked out of the box, so I was able to take down dantooine, the little Mini-ITX box currently being used in the office as a print server and guest machine.

This lets me put the chaoswolf's old HP desktop in place as the guest machine without having to resort to a KVM switch. So that's 40 watts I won't be spending. Having to get at the connectors on the back also gave me an excuse to take down nova, the main fileserver, and replace the UPS with a spare. I have a new battery on order, but meanwhile I won't have the annoying warning signal. Also it's been behaving oddly and not talking to the computer -- I may be better off simply replacing it.

Of course, bouncing nova also runs a fsck on all the disks, which have gone some 9 months without checking. It was time.

The next thing that wants doing is doing an upgrade dance with the routers.

The router upgrade is a "dance" because the main router is currently running on what was meant to have been an interim machine. The board with three gigabit ethernet ports is still hanging off the old, slow DSL line, making it the secondary router. The old DSL line is still up because I haven't gotten off my arse long enough to switch thestarport.org over to a new mail server. (And in part because I haven't decided whether that ought to be at rahul.net, sonic.net, or dreamhost.com. I really need to do that.)

So the plan in the short term is to switch gc.thestarport.org over to an interim machine, e.g. the newly-freed-up dantooine, so that I can pop in the disk -- actually a CF card -- from the current main router and reconfigure the network interfaces.

In addition to faster networking, which is actually a pretty minor consideration, this will give me two additional ethernet interfaces on the router: the DMZ/wireless network gets one, and I may actually be able to hang the old DSL line on the other for a while.

I also plan to add a sizeable hard drive and move the Debian mirror to it. That, in turn, will free up over 100GB on the fileserver, which is currently hovering around 80% full.