It never rains, does it? The world has to find some way to add that extra little something to any mishap to turn it into a minor disaster.

The machine hosting this site was offline due to lightning-induced damage to precisely one component: the hard drive holding the /var partition. The rest of the machine was completely unaffected, which is at best highly suspicious and at worst a sign that we’re cursed.

My post about backups seems like rather heavy-handed foreshadowing, now.

It’s merrily chugging through an install of Ubuntu Server 7.04 (the beta of 7.10 is dying over some libncurses issue), at the moment. Hopefully, it’ll detect the NIC I added after it didn’t detect the built-in PCI-E one.

Meet the machine:

• 1.8 gHz Pentium Dual Core - a good price-performance tradeoff for what we’re doing with it, and it has more cache than the other budget contenders.
• Asus P5KPL-VM - comes with everything up to and including the kitchen sink. Too bad the gig LAN isn’t supported. It also has only one IDE channel—which is one more than some of the new Dell business machines I’ve been working with lately.
• 2GB DDR2-800 - I got the Kingston ValueRAM because the fellow at my friendly cheapo computer shop said that there was a timing issue with the cheaper (but shinier) OCZ stuff. I took him on his word.
• 320gb of Seagate SATA. Jiggabytes per dollar: Excessive. Cache: 16 mb.
• Case/PSU are an unused Antec Sonata (mmmm), courtesy of Boyfriend.
• Everything else is inconsequential.

So, for well under $400 CAD we have a totally sweet dev machine with a public IP (TekSavvy rocks) and seriously excessive storage. Life is good.

If only the install would finish so I can get along with granting Owen ssh access :)

-Leigh