I finally took a proper look at my finances. Saved about 50 pounds a month
so far by practicing the ancient art of ‘retention team brinkmanship’
on NTL and several insurance companies (I heartily recommend this butt-ugly but invaluable site) .
Sort-of-related and as planned
, my last mini-itx board is on ebay this week.
Nano-itx boards are finally in the shops , and they’re a lot nicer than mini-itx in a lot of ways, but I can’t find it in me to get that excited. They’re very late ; EPIAs size “don’t impressa me much” any more (there’s more competition now), and even the fastest boards are dog slow compared to a 300 quid Dell (yes, they’re ugly. Hide them in the loft.). So they sort of fall between two chairs.
Anyway, by Thursday I’ll be server-free.
Instead of servers that sit around waiting for ribena to be poured into them, I’ll have (on toddler-inaccessbly high shelves):
- a 250Gb buffalo linkstation fileserver
- my slug
- a gumstix 200xm connex (sold the 400 to pay for it. 4Mb flash was a bit cramped)
The Linkstation was mainly because the eMac filled up
with bittorrented bbc telly and I needed a networked disk.
First thought was ‘use the slug’, but that’s for breaking playing with.
Besides, I want
lots of storage for not lots of money, so I need 3.5” disks.
That means an external caddy, which is ugly, noisy, unwieldy and needs a mains plug (it’s tricky to get mains power up by the wrt54g and I’m not up for dangling cat5 around the house like it’s LAN Christmas).
Creating users, shares etc is a doddle and it’s pretty fast.
It has a not-quite silent fan, but then it’s above the eMac (a.k.a. ‘the iHairdryer’)
so by comparison it’s a ninja on tiptoes.
Samba works fine, but I’d like a newer netatalk, multicast dns and NFS (then the slug and gumstix have access to comparitively unlimited storage) so I need custom firmware .
This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to get away from as a recovering makeworld addict
but in this case I think it’s justified.
In other news : hairy lobsters , eh? wow.