Time for a server upgrade...

Our server went down for a while Fri. I'm not quite sure how long since Sarah was on it early Fri evening updating photos and I noticed it around 1:15am Sat. It is an old Gateway 450 MHz Pentium II with 256 MB RAM running Suse Linux that probably is either having a power supply problem or I kicked it too many times under my desk. I have considered upgrading it for quite sometime considering there are three fast AMD's sitting next to it. I hate to have to run too many machines simultaneously. Virtualizing it is something that has crossed my mind before since there is a smoking fast dual processor AMD Athlon MP 2000+ & 1800+ machine with 3 gigs of RAM sitting next to me. It is primarily my malware analysis box that is currently in flux as to the OS that will end up on it. I like Suse and Kubuntu. Suse is slick and well-done, plus I like KDE. Suse also is not free and RPMs suck. Kubuntu uses KDE and is Debian-based making software management so much easier than RPMs, but alas, the SMP support is not fabulous and it destroyed the performance of my VMware virtual machines. I downloaded the ISO for Yoper and may try that out after I finish my current NWC review (Red Hat stuff ;). There is a dual mobo with an Athlon MP 1800+ with a gig of RAM that I may be giving Jordan soon. Maybe I can talk him into buying me an Athlon MP 2600+ in exchange so he could then have it with dual 1800+ processors. That is an idea that I might just have to bug him about.

Currently, my desktop is an Athlon 64bit 3200+ with a gig of RAM and there is an Athlon 2600+ with a gig of RAM just sitting next to it unused. Maybe it should become a file and web server...I just don't know. So much power and so little bandwidth used by our sites. That is partly why I was thinking of virtualizing the web server. It provides a layer of security in addition to being able to consolidate server tasks to one powerful machine. Enough rambling about this. I still have yet figured out the true usefulness of the debugging tools I wrote about previously. They are installed, I created a crash dump, opened it to see complaints about symbol issues and have not been able to get much further. Time to sleep since Gabi is finally sleeping. Good night.