Anyway, so far it's been quite nice. I made filet mignon on Saturday which turned out awesome indeed. I've done some cleaning up (though not nearly enough.)
Also, on Saturday
ibexris and I bottled up most of our mead in preparation for his impending move. I now have 4 cases of mead stacked up in the kitchen. w00t! I've got strawberry, blueberry, strawberry/blueberry, chocolate and saffron. I used some of the saffron in the veggies that went with the steak on Saturday and it was quite lovely. We also had a bottle of the blueberry with dinner, and I must say that it's some pretty strong stuff. It went right to my head, hence the previous post.We're seeing a realtor on Wednesday to introduce ourselves and look at some places. We want some place small. Unfortunately that probably means that I won't be able to keep the rack that I worked so hard to keep ahold of. In place of a full rack I'm looking at putting together a small cluster of EPIA systems, reusing the ram and disks in my current systems. These guys draw very little power (they have 55W external power supplies, like a laptop) and use a chipset fan for the CPU. In all, they are quiet and low power. This is important because they'll probably get shoved in a closet. The other upside to this is that I'd save on the electric bill which is always a good thing.
It's looking like I can get the systems for just about $150 each. I want 4 of them. 2 each for the mail/dns and web clusters. Why a cluster you ask? oh, you didn't ask, well I'm telling you anyway. I want to run failover pairs of systems using DRDB and a few Linux HA utils. There is a copy of Linux Magazine on my desk with this article in it. I really want to try this.
So basically I'd end up paying $300 each to replace my two most important servers with failover clusters. Not a bad deal really. I'm not sure what to do with the firewall just yet, but probably the same trick will work. I'd need a reasonably priced fanless switch that supports tagged vlans so that I can handle the multiple nets without needs 4 NICs. hmm, time to visit eBay :)
