Starport: Shai Dorsai!

[mdlbear]

Last night I dragged Dorsai, the erstwhile recording box, into the office from the studio bedroom, and pulled out the Delta 1010 soundcard, which will go on the new recording box when I can afford one. It's a very quiet 1.8GHz AMD64 machine. This morning I downloaded the installers for Debian Lenny RC1, and started the install. It's amazing how quickly you can install Debian over gigabit ethernet from a local mirror, and Lenny has an impressively fast boot (hands off, with default timeouts in the bios and grub, it's 70 seconds from power-on to gdm login).

I still need to finish configuring it and installing all the software I usually use, but it should be a vast improvement.

It's also worth noting that the new kernel has, for the first time that I can recall, properly configured sound on the ancient Thinkpad I've been using in the living room.

The final steps in decommissioning Harmony, the old office workstation, will be moving the mirror disk back to Nova (the fileserver), and the Delta 66 soundcard to Dorsai. Sometime this week, hopefully. May make Harmony the interim recording box.

 

In other computer-related news, splitting a half-hour concert up into songs takes about two hours of work. A faster machine should cut that a little by speeding up things like import, export, and normalization. That's the hope, anyway.

The next major system-administration projects are fixing the wireless networking infrastructure (which hopefully will make printing work from laptops) and (finally!) getting rid of my old DSL line. The latter has been taking a long time because I'm using it for the mail server; I'll have to move mail to an ISP, which scares the heck out of me. It's long past time to do it, though.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Recommend Fastmail (http://www.fastmail.fm) if you're going non-self-managed with your email. For $40/year you can point the mx's for your domain there, 6GB mail and 2GB web storage, WebDAV, no ads, no graphics at all on the website (with the exception of the favicon thingy), they use open source under the hood (Postfix/SpamAssassin/Sieve), they let you edit your own sieve script (and syntax-check it before allowing commit!), and they have secure SMTP/IMAP/POP (starttls or ssl ports). In short, made of awesome. I use'em for backup MX, and I get very very little blow-by spam off them.

[mdlbear]

Looks interesting. So I suppose you'd use a sieve script to recognize actual users, and suck everything down with fetchmail? Could it use secure SMTP to push mail as it arrives?

My other alternative is to simply move over to Dreamhost, which gives me unlimited POP/IMAP usernames, or to drop back to a control-panel account on Rahul.net.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

It can certainly forward as mail arrives, and it will use STARTTLS if it's available, though there's no way to mandate it.

The trick is either being in control of your own spam filtering, or finding someplace (like Fastmail) that's as good as you'd like... the SpamAssassin has the Bayesain filtering, user-based, with retrain... works gooooood. :)

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

I've never met a shy Dorsai! /rimshot