The Coop has just gained a capital investment of HK$1,000, which after some thoughts and discussion with one of the Coop members, I have decided to invest into another bar of 512MB to bring the total memory of mother to a whopping 1GB (WOW BFD!) and a large-ish HD to put into my home server for off-site snapshot backup similar to this.
It is about time that I would need to upgrade the system software on mother. It is currently on OpenBSD 3.6, while the current is 3.9, and 4.0 is due shortly. What I used to do was do setup half of a RAID on a spare HD at home, install the latest stable version of OpenBSD on it, install all the necessary software and copy all the config data across, then take this HD to the data centre where mother is housed, bring mother down, pull one of the HD out and put new HD in, bring mother up in single user mode, copy all user data across to new HD, then delete everything on the old HD, reboot and rebuild RAID. Last time I did it somehow I blew mother’s motherboard. This round I’d just have to be ultra careful.
I’ll also need to somehow reconnect the DVD reader. Right now due to some physical constraints it is not possible to connect the DVD reader, and this is affecting our plan to be able to do big file transfers via post: by sending a DVD to Telehouse and have the nice sysadms to pop it into mother for us. This is pretty much the only viable method to put lots of photos and large movie files onto mother.
I have also been investigating virtualization, for better security and easier management. With our very limited capital investment budget, we can’t acquire a couple of machines for process migration (i.e. machine A fails, just restart snapshots of processes on machine B and carry on), but FreeBSD-like jail is now available on OpenBSD as well, so I’ll definitely take a look at it.
The only problem is, I’ve turned my own test machine into my old man’s everyday computer, and I ain’t getting it back. I need a new computer.