New potential naming scheme, charting out the next upgrade.

For quite awhile, I’ve been using anime and game characters for most of my systems. Precis from Star Ocean 2, Ein from Cowboy Bebop, Ruri from Nadesico, Lain from Serial Experiments Lain, Bebedora from Arc the Lad 4. My game systems usually have Final Fantasy related names. Rikku the PS2, Penelo the PS3…

When thinking about Bebedora and the reasons for naming it that, I came up with a new naming scheme. Bebedora in the game is a puppet and a puppet master, controls enemies like puppets. Bebedora the system has my keyboard and mouse, and controls all the other systems with that keyboard and mouse. What’s another interesting puppeteer? Nessus the Pierson’s Puppeteer from Ringworld. I then started naming all my systems based on this.

precis->louiswu (Kind of the main character, and also the main outside server.)
ruri->teela (The lucky server that gets all the new parts)
ein->speaker (speaker-to-animals, my firewall. :)
bebedora->nessus (The puppeteer, only windows box)

I’ll probably keep the game system names the same though.



For the first time ever, I’m upgrading my home linux server first and giving the windows system the handmedown parts… The windows box has just become less and less important over time as I get more entertainment choices outside it, and as the quality of windows games declines. I’ll probably keep it for the few good independent games (Like ones from Stardock and Moonpod.) I won’t keep feeding it the top of the line stuff though like I have. With all the video editing and recoding I do these days I need more power over on the linux box.

Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450Watt SmartPower 2.0 Power Supply - Retail $99.99 $99.99
ASRock ALiveXFire-eSATA2 Socket AM2 ATI CrossFire Radeon Xpress 1600 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail $72.99 $72.99
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Windsor 2.4GHz Socket AM2 Processor Model ADA4600CUBOX - Retail $210.00 $210.00
GeIL 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop $114.99 $114.99
3x HITACHI Deskstar T7K500 HDT725025VLA380 (0A33423) 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $69.99 $209.97
GIGABYTE GV-RX16P256DE-RH Radeon X1600PRO 256MB GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Silent Pipe II Lead Free Video Card - Retail $89.99 $89.99
Total cost, just about $800. About $50 less if I buy the B-stock Sonata case from antec directly.

3 hard drives, because I started looking at SATA3.0 drives and noticed that every single brand had at least 2 people who said it died in a few months on them. Every… single… brand…

I just don’t know if I can trust in hard drives now, and with how cheap they are, I’m going to setup a software Raid-0 on ruri for my important data drives (var, home,) and a third drive to store the DVR videos on. That should be an improvement over my every-6-month backup-to-DVD-R. :)

I’m debating if I want to buy a PVR500 card for this. There’s only 2 years until analog signals disappear entirely, so it may be a waste of money. I only have 3 card slots on this board though.

It leaves me with something of a dilemma though. Ruri’s old hardware would be an ideal choice to replace bebedora’s somewhat flaky hardware, but it also doesn’t have PCI Express That means I’d be limited to the Radeon 9600XT for awhile with it. I wonder if I should just keep bebedora’s system and see if I can stabilize it by removing the two PCI cards and going back to the internal ethernet instead of my PCI gigabit. I guess I’ll try that first…