Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

For a good few years now, the house server has been a little Shuttle box, running Microsoft's Small Business Server. It's done a decent enough job, especially for a machine originally bought to be a small Media Center PC. Lately, though, it's started showing its age. We wanted to hook up an eSATA card to give it a nice fast backup - but it didn't have PCI Express slots, and the Shuttle form factor seriously limited any future hardware expansion. The final straw came when we decided to run Exchange 2007 to get all the good new mobile device management tools, but it wasn't a 64-bit machine.

A few months back I bought a cheap little HP server, ready to migrate to a whole new multi-core 64-bit future.



It was a bit of a barebones rig, so I threw in more memory (taking it up to 2GB of RAM - and I've since ordered another 4GB), and another couple of SATA drives, to a grand total of more than 1TB of storage. Things paused for a bit for a while, due to work and travel. When I got a magazine commission to write about the upgrade process for a network just like mine, I knew the time had come to finally do the deed - and retire the old server in favour of the new hardware sat next to it on our Ikea server rack.

The result has been a busy few days, while I migrated things over. Moving from SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 isn't trivial (though the actual mail server side of things is relatively straightforward, just involving lots of waiting while mailboxes replicated from one server to the next). I also took the opportunity to move us from a self-generated set of SSL certificates to a reasonably priced multi-named set that came from a trusted third party (a task that involved ccomley at Wizards tweaking the sandm.co.uk DNS settings). Things were made a little simpler by the decision to retire the old server at the end of the process. SBS works well when it controls the a network - it's just (like most dictators) unhappy about giving up power. Once you learn the appropriate incantations the forest moves and the fortress falls.

So now the revolution is over, and the network chez SandM has a new master. It's goodbye to Iocaine, and (in an accidental Pink Floyd reference that resulted from our Princess Bride server nomenclature) it's welcome to TheMachine.

It's a good move - we end up with HTML email on our phones, and the ability to wipe them remotely. We also get a much faster server, with much more disk space and plenty of memory - and thanks to the eSATA card I fitted, full server backups that take less than 30 minutes.

Now what do we do with the old box? After, all, it still works just fine...

According to El Reg, the servers have been stolen from the data centre where they've been running both his and the WOMAD sites...

Maybe someone was listening to this song as they walked off with the hardware...

I know something about opening windows and doors
I know how to move quietly to creep across creaky wooden floors
I know where to find precious things in all your cupboards and drawers
Slipping the clippers
Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires
The sense of isolation inspires
Inspires me
I like to feel the suspense when I'm certain you know I am there
I like you lying awake, your baited breath charging the air
I like the touch and the smell of all the pretty dresses you wear
Intruders happy in the dark
Intruder come
Intruder come and leave his mark, leave his mark

Still, the site is slowly coming back - so score one for data recovery.

Oddly Gabriel is keynoting at Salesforce.com's European DreamForce event in London this week. I don't think this makes him quite the poster boy for SaaS!

Buy wins with a technical knockout in round 1.

I was planning on building a new 64-bit server for the house, as I've got a spare mother board and an Intel CoreDuo processor to hand, along with the appropriate server OS licenses. We're planning on upgrading from our current little AMD-powered server to something with a bit more poke, and also want to use eSATA for a backup drive. As a result I've been pricing up cases, power supplies, and memory.

The bits I needed were going to come in at around £200 or so. Not too bad for a server, I thought. Then I found an advert in PC Pro, for a company advertising an OS-less HP server for less than 180 quid including VAT. If I look at the cost to me of my time, and the cost of the bits I need to finish my box, the decision turns out to be something of a no-brainer. There's no way I can build a box for that price.

We've ordered the machine (which also turns out to be a dual core Xeon), and sprung for an additional pile of memory via Crucial (the HP prices for memory were rather silly).

Free delivery too, even if I do have to wait a week...

I think that motherboard will now end up as my next desktop PC.

It's official - we can now announce the new writing gig I've been hinting at.

From the start of September marypcb and I will be looking after the Server and Networking sections of IT Pro. Not only that, we'll also be running a joint blog on the IT Pro site.

On a more formal note, we'll be doing several news stories a week, and a similar number of features a month - so we'll be looking for plenty of press releases and people to talk to.

Any PRs with relevant clients, please, get in touch - we're starting to work on September right now!

We're not dropping any of our other regular writing. We'll just be busier...