Linux servers

Well, it finally happened. My long-time friend "slamd", the experimental Linux server box, has died.

( The picture shows the pub-machine 'slackr' )

I got it from my brother about 4-5 years ago, when it had been obsolete for almost 2 years already. It was not a custom power-house, nor was it bleeding edge technology.., it was MINE. And it did what I had in mind for it, and it did it pretty damn well too I must add.

It was a scruffy AMD Athlon XP 2500+, running on a special legacy ATX-board made by 'ABit' --not the most stable hardware I've ever used--, with 2GB Corsair DDR RAM, a GeForce 6600 GT GFX card, some USB 2.0 extension cards and a Creative Audigy 2 ZX 7.1 digital surround soundcard.

I used the box as:

• a house-central secondary NAT router
• an UPnP multimedia server
• a network fileserver
• a central database server (for hosting web-content served by my public-machine)

Lately, the motherboard just wouldn't boot up properly. My suspicions fall on the rather dusty CPU-chip I had put in it, but for all I know, the motherboard has met it's end of days...

So, I had to disconnect my public-machine (a dusty, dirt-old Pentium III 800MHz box), throw out 'slamd', put in the public-machine as a temporary replacement and route all the public requests in to my private internal LAN where the pub-machine acts in it's own DMZ.

Then I had to re-compile my UPnP mediaserver software because 'slamd' had it's software repository stored on one of it's internal IDE harddrives, and I just couldn't be bothered about doing backup-jobs and the like... so, I went with 'K.I.S.S.' like I usually do ;P