MikeBrum.com

I was kinda bored tonight so I got a Centos box up and running.

This is going to perform a few important tasks that I didn’t previously have:

• computer redundancy – since my last host died, I only have my laptop (macbook pro). Given how much of a PITA it is to repair hardware issues on a laptop, I need some redundancy should the worse happen.
• SSH endpoint – again, since my last host died, I don’t have a box to SSH into when I’m remote and want to pull files off of my NAS. This hasn’t been a huge issue most of the time, but there’s certainly a level of convenience that’s lost.
• tertiary backups – my NAS is RAID 1 and it has an external HD attached to backup important data to it weekly, but I like spreading my data around as much as I can to make sure that I survive the always painful hard drive crash (it’s not “if”, but “when”!!).
• python/django test environment – I’m considering learning python/django and I don’t want to muck around with apache on my mac. I already have a LAMP setup on the box, but it’s less than ideal. I figure I can set up a real environment that more closely mirrors my server than I can on my mac (which is close, but not perfect).

When my PC died on me a while back, I basically just unplugged everything and left it sitting in my office collecting dust. Given that was its only job, it did so with great effort. I gutted everything except the mobo and PSU and gave it a respectable cleaning. I ran into some problems reseating the CPU at one point and due to some butterfingers, managed to bend like 30 pins. Whoops! Some patience, a steady hand, tweezers, a straight edge and 15 minutes later and I had a working chip again. Gotta remember not to do that again.

The only hardware-related things left to do will be to throw a few spare HDs in it to run backups, but that’s it. From here on out, I just have to set up the HTTP environment and get that squared away. I’m just happy that I’ll be able to immediately SSH into my home network again from remote locations.

It’s amazing how such a little thing can be so amazingly convenient.