Happy New Year! As probably all of the world has noticed 😉 my blog went off-line in the beginning of November 2011. It was due to a server malfunction. It has a long story, my server that is – at first (10 years ago) it was a Pentium II MMX 233MHz with 64MB of RAM and 4GB HDD running Slackware 7 I guess. This one got fried after I couldn’t stand the noise and put it into a cupboard – poor choice ;] Later I assembled a Celeron 300MHz solution with 60GB HDD and 128 MB of RAM which later was upgraded to 256 MB. It was running under Slackware 10.1. Actually this one was amazingly reliable machine. Except for the PSU, which broke several times during the past decade, no other component was ever malfunctioning. Some time in 2011 though it suffered from either motherboard, CPU or RAM damage (I didn’t have time or will to inspect that) so to replace it I grabbed another PC that I had been using as HTPC before – a Dell Optiplex GX240 with 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. I’ve put the old 60GB HDD into it and it worked like a charm without any modifications to the OS (gotta love Linux for that). Unfortunately something bad happened again and the server stopped working. It didn’t get up after restart performed by a 3rd person (my server is 1500+ km away from my current location), so I assumed it had been broken permanently. Surprisingly it somehow managed to start up when I powered it up personally during Christmas (after 2-month break), lol. Anyway it was too late because I had already bought a Shuttle XS35GTV2 – a fan-less Atom D525 (1.8GHz, 2 cores, 4 threads) based solution with NVIDIA ION2 512 MB graphics card, 4GB of RAM and 120GB Intel 320 Series solid-state drive! Wow! Quite an upgrade, right? Now I’m using it as both server and HTPC. Thanks to NVIDIA ION2 it has no problems at all with playing 1080p HD content and it remains acceptably cool during the process. Total lack of moving elements and sound is just… well… incredibly rewarding for your ears and, I guess/hope, promising in terms of reliability. This set-up works under Ubuntu 11.10 (XBMC for HTPC functionality), which BTW I’ve also found quite pleasing (yes, I mean Unity ;P ) and intend to test on my desktop PC 😉 Well, that’s it, please keep your fingers crossed so that my new server doesn’t break any time soon (and preferably – ever) 😉
