I’ve fried 2 processors in the past 2 weeks.  That’s not a good track record.  Maybe I overheated them with one too many FPS games, but I think the culprit was a bad motherboard.  Since I was running on some older technology, most of it wouldn’t work in any of the newer hardware (I had a socket 478 Pentium 4 with DDR 1 RAM and ATA-166 drives), I knew I was headed for a “forklift upgrade”.

I got a clearance workstation for $400.  Not bad for something with a dual-core (Pentium-D so it’s one generation behind) CPU, 2 GB  RAM, 2 250 GB SATA drives and an Nvidia graphics card.  I probably couldn’t buy the components for that much.

Right now I’m taking the OS (Debian with some special sources) and putting it on the new drives.  Even if you hate software raid, it does give you a solid amount of portability from one drive technology to another, like I am here with the transition from raid on IDE drives to raid on SATA drives.  The operations dweeb in me likes that flexibility.

The point here is that flexibility ~= availability.  That’s why you have a security architecture.  That’s why things such as load balancers, DNS, and redundant SAN fibre switches make sense.

• My System Environment
• Server Upgrades
• Clearances and Economy of Scale
• It’s Still not Too Late
• Lions, Tigers, and VLANs Oh MY!