I got sick of wanky pseudo-African named-operating systems.

Actu­ally, that’s a lie, but I’m feel­ing a lit­tle vit­ri­olic (oxy­moron?). Ubuntu didn’t work at all, and of a sud­den Cen­tOS did. It’s not quite as pol­ished but I could grow to love it (maybe). I just need to look past this whole RPM thing, which really is ugly com­pared to the breadth and depth of apt options avail­able. IMO, of course. And the whole ports gig just scares me so I’m gonna stay away from FreeBSD here for a while longer (until this one breaks in another two years?)

I’d for­got­ten how much work I’d put into mak­ing Samba shares behave as well as they had been for the last for­ever, too. And was con­vinced there was noth­ing of value left on the com­puter (I didn’t delete the home direc­to­ries, just in case… that was really easy because they’re even on a phys­i­cally sep­a­rate vol­ume, it was basi­cally less effort to just leave them there) and con­se­quently (yet again) deleted a MySQL data­base with StuffOf­Value™ in it. In this case a CYIADA sur­vey data­base I’d built because there were no other options avail­able and (you prob­a­bly guessed it) I hadn’t sorted out host­ing by IT at work yet.

So the aim now is to setup a sim­i­larly solid server that’ll last me another two years, bar­ring hard­ware upgrades (this thing desparately needs more RAM even though it’s got half a gig – I have no idea where it all goes). This time around it’ll be more web-production-esque in its role, which basi­cally means it’ll have more than just being a quiet Samba PDC and file server and web dump­ing ground on its plate, at least until every­thing I’ve got planned for it today reaches matu­rity, or my sit­u­a­tion changes to the point that pay­ing for a VPS or real ded­i­cated server some­where else is a viable option. Loki does, indeed, work quite well, but I can’t screw with it quite as much as some things make me want to (not that I’d want to do that to Loki… in between cat­a­strophic hard­ware fail­ure it’s amaz­ingly sta­ble and the lack of gen­eral screwing-around-ness is prob­a­bly a big part of that! Prob­a­bly… :P)

No aspi­ra­tions sur­round­ing the idea of a media server this time around. Though there’s a pos­si­bil­ity I’ll look at maybe build­ing a ter­abyte RAID server later this year, which would mean rethink­ing whisper’s role some­what. It’d prob­a­bly be relo­cated to down­stairs (it’s cooler there) and replaced by a case with bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion and requir­ing bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion. The EPIA board I’ve got isn’t pas­sively cooled, but I reckon it can deal with get­ting toasty that much more because it’s got a fan stuck to it. It’s a bor­der­line fan require­ment, any­way — the hard dri­ves get hot­ter than the proces­sor (high­est I’ve seen the dri­ves is about 62° C, the proces­sor would only hit 55, tops) on forty-something degree Syd­ney days. If the stor­age upgrade is called for I’d prob­a­bly look at get­ting some­thing with a bit more grunt though, just because if the space requires bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion then that lets me stop con­strain­ing the sys­tem power accord­ing to temperature!

Any­way. Now I’m a Cen­tOS kid. Which makes me feel kinda dirty inside because of the whole Promi­nent North Amer­i­can Upstream Provider All In Title Case issue, but I think I can live with myself for the time being.