yesterday morning, a friend of mine in DC (chris) bought 6 tickets to see NIN in san antonio on 10/16. NIN is one of the bands that i’ve been wanting to see for years but haven’t had the luck to get the tickets in time. earlier this year, i missed the ticket release by less than a week. back in 2000, i missed the ticket release by 6 hours. anyways, i’m glad i get to finally see them before i get too old and uninterested in concerts.

i wanted to hit on some stuff about my home lan. for those of you who don’t know, i usually have a lan at home setup to serve many utilities such as webserver, fileserver, dvd/cd burner, desktop machine, laptop, router, testbed, and several unutilized machines. here’s the current setup (bear in mind, half of the lan is currently in the closet due to space issues):

Note: all internal ip addresses are in the 192.168.0.0/24 block, with 192.168.0.200+ being dedicated to dhcp.

citadel (72): main desktop [950 mhz amd]
erebus (34): fileserver (svn, nfs, smb, ftp, mp3) [733 mhz p3]
babel (92): dvd/cd burner [733 mhz p3]
phobos (75): webserver [75 mhz sparcstation 4]
lappy (20): laptop [1.6 ghz intel]
hanger (2): router [200 mhz intel]
testbed (56): test boxes [ranging from 233 mhz intel to 666 mhz dual intel]

ok so basically, the citadel machine runs gentoo and fluxbox (gnome backup). stays pretty up to date, but in the “x86″ keywords. i ran in the “~x86″ field before, but that led to _many_ problems. something about running nightlies just doesn’t seem quite right anymore. lappy is our dell inspiron 2650 laptop that runs winxp (that’s right, the only windows machine in the house). it’s starting to age and will most likely be replaced in a year. to those of you who know me well, this next statement may shock you. lappy will most likely be replaced by an apple laptop. ok, pick your jaw up off the ground.

hanger is a donated machine with 400 mbs of hdd space running ipcop. a company i interned for several years ago wanted to throw it away and they let me have it. eventually, hanger will be spruced up. i am thinking of building an mini-itx machine. all of the testbed machines are in the closet on the patio. none of them were operational and have incomplete cases. i was too lazy to complete them. eventually, i’d like to turn the testbed machines into a cluster for folding at home.

lastly, why i began talking about all of this to begin with. phobos is an old server box that a friend of mine from school (ron pedde). the only reason why i even wanted it was because it was a small and contained rack-sized machine. it even had a 16 gig scsi harddrive. the problem is i’m not wanting to use that machine much anymore. because it’s a sparc machine, support in linux is iffy. i know gentoo would be a better fit than debian, but i cringe at the idea of compiling everything on a 75 mhz processor. also, babel has become so far out of date, updating it has become a serious problem. it was an original 1.4 gentoo install and has since been updated to 2004.2. it has way too many useless applications. and compounded with the updating problem, has made it too difficult to maintain in its current installation. the best idea is to bonk the portage and bins, replace with 2005.0, and rebuild the whole system with updated use flags. this should take less time since i’ve done the exact same thing on the fileserver and there will be no X windows applications installed. i’ve also contemplated making it the webserver as well, to knock out the phobos problem as well.

im not sure yet on all of that however, and the next week should prove to be an experiment. im going to look for a minimalistic webserver that at the least supports fastcgi (php would be nice). since the old kernel on babel was 2.4.2x, the new libata + 2.6.x kernels should prove to make the dvd burning and setup easier.

citadel is finished being setup and has moved into an update cycle (updates performed bimonthly). erebus still needs smb and nfs to be setup; they are installed and updated, just not setup. lappy can’t be updated (pity it’s winxp). hanger is updated periodically via ipcop’s lovely update process.

so when i finish the experiments with babel, i’ll post some updates. also, i was wondering if everyone can ping my dyndns hostname: s1n.dyndns.org. also, you can browse to my music server here. if it becomes too bogged down, i will have to restrict external access to privelaged IPs. if you are unable to access my music server, please let me know, same if you cannot. since the webserver is not setup, do not direct your browser to the hostname, hanger will forward the request into the void.

time to get to work on babel.