Network

I miss my network. That sounds geeky enough but 2 years ago I had 5 machines running and another 3 not online but functional and another 2 or so worth of parts.

My desktop should be on the way soon which will be nice to have as a server and gaming machine. I just don't feel good about running my laptop for so many hours at a time.

I do have an ftp server running at my brother's house, which is nice because I don't have to do any of the hardware support. It serves as a backup for me and I can access the data almost anywhere in the world.

My old network consisted of a server that had almost 1 TB RAID5 and attached printer shared to the network. I had a gaming machine with plenty of ram and a nice video card. I had a laptop for blogging on the couch on the porch. My router had better firmware. Numerous USB devices attached to a powered up. Now it's just my laptop and pda.

Jay and I talked at one point about reducing clutter and stuff that has many other costs such as time and effort required for maintaining so many machines. He's right, it does require a lot more work to support 2 machines than 1, but I miss having a wide network. If there is a problem with the machine you're working on and you don't have time to fix it there is always another machine that you can finish your work on. Spilled something on your keyboard?, there's 3 spares. I had extras of everything and it was nice.

I could offset the load onto another machine. This was really handy when I ripped my entire CD collection. Every time I walked by the server I just exchanged CDs and walked away, it ripped automagically. Mydocs were stored on the server, accessible from any machine on the network.
Running a domain was fun but troublesome. Same with the DNS.

While most people looked at it as excessive to run all this equipment and services I found it thrilling. This is a learning experience for me. It's good to have upgraded the firmware on my pda, it didn't need it, but now I know how. It makes me more valuable in my job as a Tech.

When I finally own my own house, I plan on doing all my own structured cabling. There will be two phone, two data, 2 coax, and speaker to every room in the house, including bathrooms and kitchen. There will of course be wireless to stream all of those, but there is never a substitute for a wire.

Yeah I lie awake at night thinking about this stuff.