Not that anyone noticed (or cares), but I switched servers again. My Inner Geek wouldn’t let me work with a substandard piece of equipment when a much better substandard piece of equipment was just sitting here in my office, begging to be used. (What passes for) my pride was at stake!

I’m now hosting Uncle Andrew Dot Net on a highly Frankensteined Power Computing PowerTower Pro 225. I dumped a spare G3/400 processor upgrade into it, along with an ATA controller card, 80 gig hard drive, 768 megs of RAM and a 10/100 Ethernet card. Once again, XPostFacto allowed me to install OS X, which allowed me to use Apache and MySQL to get the blog up and running.

I tend to name my computers after prehistoric sea creatures (ammonite, trilobyte, celocanth, etc.). When it came to this new server, I settled on Archelon, a giant prehistoric sea turtle. Something about the combination of large size and ponderous speed really resonated with me in regards to this computer. 😉

All in all Archelon is a significant imrovement over Ichabod the Headless PowerBook:

• faster processor
• more RAM
• larger, faster hard drive
• capable of using OS X’s built-in drive mirroring capabilities
• 100baseTX full-duplex Ethernet, versus 10baseT half-duplex on Ichabod
• six PCI slots, which means more expansion capabilities
• better power management; I like to shut down and restart my server automatically in the middle of the night, and for whatever reason Ichabod wasn’t up to the task

Hopefully this will be the last of the tinkering with the server for a while, so I can get back to tinkering with my Web cam(s). I’m thinking of taking one to my parents’ place in Hawaii and training it on their indoor koi pond. More on (moron?) this story as it develops.