Flutterby™! : Computing miscellany

Jeanne had given us an old scrap machine to repurpose for Forest, but every time I tried to update stuff on it I was getting errors on the IDE bus. Forest is getting antsy, so this weekend I repurposed the Via Eden machine that was going to be my living room media center to be the house server, and set up the old house server to be a game and edutainment machine for him. The Eden now has an 80 gig hard drive and half a gig of RAM and is happily serving up Samba shares, PostgreSQL queries and internal HTTP and all that stuff.

But let me tell you, even with a repurposed old CPU fan glued inside the case to a make sure that the hard drive stays cool, this is the way to run a server. Small, much quieter, a lot less electricity consumed. If I'm sure that I can get the whatever-that-silly-protocol that lets instant-messaging type apps work behind IP masquerading going I'll probably stick another ethernet card in this beast and give my router to a worthy cause.