My server was down for about four hours early this morning. I noticed it after I got up and rebooted it, but if you couldn't see the top rotation picture for a while in there, that's the reason why.

My server is a rickety old man. Think of it as a 90 year old guy, bent, dependent on a walker to move at all, one foot in the grave. It's amazing to me that it's still running.

I bought it 8 years ago and it's been running 24/7 ever since, except for two periods when I was moving. It was far from the fastest hardware even when it was new. The CPU is an AMD K6-2 running at a whopping 300 MHz. It has a 20G hard drive. It's a Cobalt Qube 3, and it's been amazingly reliable. (I am astounded that the HD is still running, after all this time.)

But recently it's been resetting itself quite a lot, and I think I know why: heat faults. I've only had it open once. When I first bought it, it had 64M of RAM. First thing I did was to open it up and stuff it with as much RAM as it could hold: 2 SIMMs of 100 MHz SDRAM totalling 512M. Then I closed it again, and it's been like that ever since. It's been operating in dusty circumstances (cough, I'm not much of a house keeper) and I'm sure the inside of the case now is fouled with dust, interfering with air flow. I need to open it up again and blow all that out, but I'm a little afraid that if I do that, it'll stop working.

I've thought about buying something new. This cost me $1500 (and well worth it!) but these days you can get no-name blade servers for half that. What I don't know is what the management software on them is like. One of the things that is really nice about the Qube is that it was a turn-key solution, and could be totally managed using a web browser via ethernet. I fear that one of those blade servers might need a keyboard and a screen, which would pretty much defeat the purpose.

And though it's not true any more, there was a time when Cobalt, and later Sun, had an automatic update mechanism for the Qube not unlike what Microsoft has for Windows. I could tell it to update and it would contact a server and download all the patches available and install them automatically. I seriously doubt that a no-name blade server is going to have anything like that.

On the other hand, it might be nice to have a faster CPU. On the other other hand, it would mean moving everything over, and then trying to get the new server configured the way I want it. Sounds like a headache; and that's why I've been putting it off.

Oh, well. On other "daily life" matters, I just put in an order with RACS. Sixten has been watching something called "Shrine of the Morning Mist" and somehow it's a title that passed completely under my radar. Two words: miko magic. It's only $24, so I'll risk it.

Also in the order: the first half of Princess Resurrection, the second volume of Kenichi, and I decided that my Akamatsu education isn't complete so I ordered the cheapo collection of the first season of Negima!. I have the first two loose DVDs of that around here somewhere, and I really didn't like it the first time.

But now I know the characters better, and I'm going to try to see it through all the way to the end. I'm still expecting to be disappointed, but maybe it'll be better for me this time. So we'll see how it goes. (I'm particularly expecting to be disappointed by the Asuna arc, which is non-canon anyway.)

There are still some titles upcoming that I'm waiting on, and I'll order those beginning of July when they're all in: Gakuen Alice, Kaze no Stigma, and the third DVD of Ah My Buddha.

UPDATE: Another thing about the Qube that I like is that it has 2 ethernet ports and is configured to act as a firewall and NAT server. The first cheapo blade server I looked at only had one ethernet port. It has a slot, and a card could be added, but it means the system software isn't normally configured to do NAT so I'd have to set it up.

I wish Cobalt was still around so I could buy something new from them! (Damn Sun, grumble grumble. And now that they've been acquired by Oracle, the chance of the Cobalt brand -- and philosophy -- being brought back is indistinguishable from zero.)

UPDATE: Something like this would be pretty cool, except that it only has one ethernet port, and I'm not sure it's configured to be a web server. I'm also not sure if "Windows Home Server" knows how to do NAT. And I'm not really sure it would be secure if exposed to the internet.

Someone cracked my Qube one time. Fortunately, they weren't malicious. They got in through the SQL port. (Why, Cobalt, was there an SQL port open on the internet connection? Why?) Anyway, after I cleaned up the mess I locked nearly every standard open port with the firewall, and I've been secure ever since.

UPDATE: By the way, I uncharacteristically open this up to suggestions and commentary. Please note the following: compiling Linux kernels is a bad thing, something I don't want to learn to do. Turn key is good. Management through a web browser is good; management through shell commands stinks. Server requiring a keyboard and screen is very bad. Small physical footprint is good. 2 ethernet ports, and support for NAT (IP masquerading), is essential. Cheap isn't all that important.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 09:04 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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