Dave's Unix workstation died last Thursday night. This is our primary services server, being the first one for DNS, mail, web for TGD-INC.COM. It seems to be something on the motherboard, as the drives spin up fine and the tape drive looks good. We've had it for at least four years, I think. It was old tech when Dave bought it and it wasn't used heavily, although it stayed on constantly.

So the first problem is to move the services over to Jennifer so that Dave's mail doesn't start bouncing. Dave sets up Jennifer so it also has Thales' IP address, something I didn't know you could do with Open Transport. Actually I knew it could be done, since IP NetRouter does it. But I didn't know you only needed to set up an IP Secondary Addresses text file to enable it.

So DNS is covered that way. For mail we set up a few accounts on Jennifer's Stalker Internet Mail Server so that Dave and Julie and Chris can still get their mail transparently, no difference for the clients. For web service we changed the little routing script to route WWW.TGD-INC.COM requests to a page saying that the main site is down for the week. All this took less than an hour to set up, and everything should be pretty much ok for now. There was like mailing list on Thales, I think, and some cgi programs that Steve was running on it. Can't use ssh anymore. Otherwise everything else should be about the same, at least for me since I tried not to use any services on Thales.

Now Dave needs to look for another computer, and he'll probably end up with another obsolete piece of equipment because he wants to be cost effective. I suppose that's how he is and he likes extending the useful life of outdated things. Me, I try to stay as state-of-the-art as I can. I don't appreciate the challenge of getting something old to work. I like the shiny gleam of a new machine all ready to go. Ahh, to bad it didn't happen to Jennifer, cause I'd have another computer the next day or two. A Mac OS X Server, which is some $4500 for the low end. But it would be great to have, and it would a heck of a long time.

Life comes down to what you will accept for yourself. I've pretty much settled for Apple-all-the-way, and I will make sure that all the computers that I use are Apple branded running an Apple OS. No other considerations for cost or reliability or software or whatever. Like any other decision, too many choices so I've factored out one dimension which makes everything else much easier.

I've been thinking about how I'd move the network if I move to a house. The key is to keep services running as much as possible. Ideally no down time. This would require a redundant network. DSL at the house with a server while keeping DSL and a server at the apartment. Have the apartment server point all DNS entries to the house server. Have Network Solutions change the name servers. Tear down the apartment network and move it as a backup server at the house. So I'd have to keep the apartment an extra month, something I'd probably do anyway since I don't like moving in one day rush rush rush. Another DSL account with its setup cost and new DSL modem which will soon be redundant. Another server so we can have to servers running at once. Good excuse to get a Mac OS X Server, eh?

It'll be interesting when Dave has one server at his boat and I have the other part of the network at my place. Probably have to VPN the network if we want to keep it secure, although we rarely use each other machines anyway. DNS doesn't care about netmasks so you can have a domain spread out over several networks. It's probably ok to not use a VPN or encryption, although the printer will be a bit harder to deal with. Probably be time for me to get a better printer anyway, like an Epson 900N.