Tick... tick... tick...
The Linux server which I keep in my bedroom is getting on my nerves. The hard drive has a really annoying whine, and tonight something on the server keeps accessing it, just under once per second, so that the repetitive 'drrt' noises of the hard drive heads drift in and out of synch with my alarm clock's ticking. I'm already finding it hard to sleep, and this is not helping. So I ended up lying awake in the dark, thinking about how my server - which is three times the speed of my first PC - is nowadays just a glorified router...
A few years ago, my server's older, slower predecessor was named Stratocaster, and I used it constantly: it was used as a secondary desktop machine for IRC, coding and occasional web browsing, plus plenty of random stuff - phpBB, web server, webcam, parts of my website, photo hosting. It held all my files, so that I could access them from any machine in the house or over the net if I wished. It acted as the firewall and router for the house network. It even had speakers hooked up to it at one point. Not bad for a P133 I bought for £10 + postage.
I've gone through a few servers since then: Altair, one of a batch of P500s I got from my Dad's surgery in exchange for writing their website; Angstrom, a P233 laptop; Neko, my little M300 (pressed into service temporarily when Angstrom's HD went kaput); and Epsilon, another of the P500s.
Most of the changes were brought about when the hard drive in the previous server died. Either consumer hard drives really aren't designed to be left on 24/7, or I've just been really unlucky. With each change of server, I've shifted more and more duties over to my desktop machine, my laptops, or my personal web hosting. Every time I reinstall, I install less packages, and restore less data from backup. When I was setting up Epsilon, I didn't bother to install anything but the essentials: ipmasq, screen and irssi.
I'm not sure whether it's that I'm tighter with my cash nowadays, or whether it's just that servers have become less important to me, but whereas I could lavish attention on Strat - bigger hard drive, processor upgrade (from 133 to 200 MHz, woo), more RAM, various peripherals - Epsilon now runs with a 3Gb HD that I found in the back of my cupboard.
The only times I really use Epsilon nowadays are for IRC, and to fiddle with firewall settings to try and get my games to run - usually fruitlessly, since I've yet to figure out why ipmasq/iptables refuses to forward ports properly when I tell it to. Of course, it's probably that I'm telling it to drop the packets on the floor. I'd use something slightly less user-hostile, like webmin, but it doesn't work properly with ipmasq, and I'm a bit scared to try anything different now - I've been using ipmasq for years, and I've only just got to grips with how to deal with it when it screws up...
Sooner or later, Epsilon's HD is going to die (or I'm going to smash it out of frustration at that whine) and I'll probably replace it with a WRT-54GS.
And thus will end my four-year Linux experiment. Well, it was fun for the first couple of years, and I've certainly come out of it with a much better understanding of Linux than when I went in. Unfortunately, it's just not *enough* understanding to deal when the system goes tits-up for no apparent reason - which it does every so often. Ironically, the reason I started using Linux in the first place was to get away from Windows' habit of getting more eccentric over time.
Ah well...
A few years ago, my server's older, slower predecessor was named Stratocaster, and I used it constantly: it was used as a secondary desktop machine for IRC, coding and occasional web browsing, plus plenty of random stuff - phpBB, web server, webcam, parts of my website, photo hosting. It held all my files, so that I could access them from any machine in the house or over the net if I wished. It acted as the firewall and router for the house network. It even had speakers hooked up to it at one point. Not bad for a P133 I bought for £10 + postage.
I've gone through a few servers since then: Altair, one of a batch of P500s I got from my Dad's surgery in exchange for writing their website; Angstrom, a P233 laptop; Neko, my little M300 (pressed into service temporarily when Angstrom's HD went kaput); and Epsilon, another of the P500s.
Most of the changes were brought about when the hard drive in the previous server died. Either consumer hard drives really aren't designed to be left on 24/7, or I've just been really unlucky. With each change of server, I've shifted more and more duties over to my desktop machine, my laptops, or my personal web hosting. Every time I reinstall, I install less packages, and restore less data from backup. When I was setting up Epsilon, I didn't bother to install anything but the essentials: ipmasq, screen and irssi.
I'm not sure whether it's that I'm tighter with my cash nowadays, or whether it's just that servers have become less important to me, but whereas I could lavish attention on Strat - bigger hard drive, processor upgrade (from 133 to 200 MHz, woo), more RAM, various peripherals - Epsilon now runs with a 3Gb HD that I found in the back of my cupboard.
The only times I really use Epsilon nowadays are for IRC, and to fiddle with firewall settings to try and get my games to run - usually fruitlessly, since I've yet to figure out why ipmasq/iptables refuses to forward ports properly when I tell it to. Of course, it's probably that I'm telling it to drop the packets on the floor. I'd use something slightly less user-hostile, like webmin, but it doesn't work properly with ipmasq, and I'm a bit scared to try anything different now - I've been using ipmasq for years, and I've only just got to grips with how to deal with it when it screws up...
Sooner or later, Epsilon's HD is going to die (or I'm going to smash it out of frustration at that whine) and I'll probably replace it with a WRT-54GS.
And thus will end my four-year Linux experiment. Well, it was fun for the first couple of years, and I've certainly come out of it with a much better understanding of Linux than when I went in. Unfortunately, it's just not *enough* understanding to deal when the system goes tits-up for no apparent reason - which it does every so often. Ironically, the reason I started using Linux in the first place was to get away from Windows' habit of getting more eccentric over time.
Ah well...