Dave bought a Sun E250 server at an auction last week, before DunDraCon. It was an out-of-business liquidation for eBalance, one of the many Internet startups that have failed recently (which means there's a lot of cheap server hardware on sale even as I write this). It has one 300 MHz (or is it 400 MHz) processor, a couple of drives totalling at least 30 GB, 512 MB RAM (?), ok I forgot most of the specifics. It's a big, heavy box that sucks power and is going to be used for really light Internet serving, but it's pretty cool.

The week after Thales died. So I get this email from Shannon, he changed ISPs and the static IP addresses were changed. Nobody can get to Chaosium or Erzo and he needs us to update the DNS tables (Thales is the secondary DNS). I go in and edit the file then do a HUP to reload the tables. Then I think: "when will the tables be reloaded?" Obviously, to my thinking, if I reboot Thales when the DNS server comes up it will resynch with the primary server. I restart Thales and it doesn't come up in 15 minutes and then I realize that it doesn't have a console attached.

Dave ICQs me, Thales is down. I tell him what happens and he says that he'll come over tomorrow to work on it. Next morning he shows up and it takes him a couple of hours to determine that Thales is dead dead dead. Who knows why. I'm pretty much taking the day off after having had to come in Tuesday to work when I wanted the day off to recover from DunDraCon. We go out to lunch at DJ's Bistro, where the music is an intriguing blend of Yugoslavian renditions of American songs like "Rocky Mountain High" and "Morning Train".

We also stopped at CompUSA to get a really expensive cable, which Dave returned immediately thinking that it wasn't the right connector, only to come back later when we found out that it was the right connector (this was after going home to check on whether there was a Fry's nearby, which I thought there was a new one but now I think I was thinking about the Trader Joe's that took over the Lucky's next to the comic book shop). Went to the game store and bought a couple of books. Went to Trader Joe's and bought those organic chips while Dave got some Ricola for his throat.

While I did whatever the heck I was doing that day, probably watching tv, Dave worked on getting the new Thales up and getting the backups restored onto it. Not exactly what he wanted to do since this was a rush job and he wanted to take the time to do it right. My priorities were DNS, mail, and web. DNS since I knew that Chaosium was still bouncing all over the place (I had Jennifer imitating Thales for a few hours but he needed the ip address back so there was no DNS server for Chaosium). Mail to get any mail before it bounces (though we do have three days so it's not a big hurry). And web is the third main server. He also had to restore some utilities he really needed like Perl and Apache (you mean Solaris doesn't come with Apache?!?).

So Dave finally got Thales running again. It uses a newer BIND than we're used to so (although we didn't know it at the time) it wasn't actually getting the Chaosium or Erzo records correctly. Beats me if it's working now, it's so hard to tell from a Unix machine. While Dave was getting Thales set up we watched Friends and the other Thursday night shows (second time for me). At one point we walked Murray and then he finally left around midnight. Dave was already getting sick and he had to work Saturday so he wasn't going to make gaming, though it turns out that he did once his employers realized he was sick as a cucumber.

For an hour or so I had visions of using Thales for really cool things. Then that whole "it's only a Unix box" hit me and I regained my sanity. I still think I'll put Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server on Jennifer once the new versions come out. Though before then I really need to update the web sites and upgrade the bandwidth and getting a new apartment or a house or ...