So says the IBM commercial. Unfortunately, my wife watched these commercials and has started complaining about our own proliferation of servers. I have 2 network servers, 2 desktops, 1 firewall (small form factor), and 1 Web server (offsite)
Short of backup servers for Precis and Ein, I believe I currently have the optimal number of systems for my house. Precis resides at my work and serves up all my web pages and web applications. A hot spare for this would be really handy to me. Ein is my WRT54GS router with OpenWRT. I haven’t been able to upgrade it though since I started working with it because it’s always in use. Another little WRT54GS would be handy…
To appease my wife, I told her that I was considering replacing Kaolla with a SFF system. Kaolla is my house DNS and DHCP server. It’s a little P2/300 and takes up a large bit of space for what it does. I was going to merge its functionality with Ein but found out ein couldn’t handle Subversion. All my DNS and DHCP Config files are kept on Precis’ Subversion server so they can be quickly replicated to all of my systems. The solution? I’m considering a Mac Mini for replacing Kaolla, and maybe even offloading more from Ruri.
Getting Kaolla was just kind of a lucky coincidence. Ruri was my main DNS/DHCP/SAMBA/Print/Jabber/etc server for ages. My Playstation 2 (Rikku) with Linux served as my backup network server for use whenever Ruri was down. It got really tiresome to reboot Rikku into linux every time I needed to take Ruri down. I got ahold of Kaolla the same time as Rikku kind of became a permanent DVD player for the house.
Maybe the Mac Mini would let me offload the job of Primary Samba Browser, Print serving, etc from Ruri over. I’m not sure quite why I want to move everything off Ruri that I can yet, but it unnerves me to be so reliant on it. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s OS hasn’t been reinstalled since 1999. Or perhaps that I have every shred of important data stored on it… Its 160gig drive makes it a very tempting target to fill up. I guess the fact that it’s an Athlon 850 with an HP OEM motherboard and a VIA southbridge. It’s getting rather crusty really. I’m really not sure what to do about it. At least I’ve started backing up my home folder to DVD-Rs.
I would rather put that money into upgrading Lain though. The cost of a Mac Mini would net me a low end Athlon 64x2… That would let me shift Lain’s hardware over to Bebedora which is the biggest cause of noise in my house right now. I really want to trash Ruri’s hardware, but I’m not sure what I should replace it with.
Anyone have a ~$200-250 solution for an small form factor server? It’d need to handle at least 1 gig of storage space, ~300mhz or higher performance and preferably at least 64-128 megs of ram. Subversion (client), DHCP, DNS, Samba (as a WINS server and Master Browser), and a small assortment of other tiny servers. This would let me get rid of the hulking P2/300 system and still have almost full redundancy on my home network…