I think I mentioned in my previous post I was planning to butcher our leechbox. It’s a dual processor Pentium II Xeon 450MHz, with 512MB of RAM running Debian. Due to recent hard drive re-arrangements in our main file server, I had a few extra drives laying around.

I thought I’d start off by changing the NIC, as we now have a Gigabit switch I pulled one of the controllers out of my server (it had three), but then Linux didn’t want to boot – I figured it’d be easier to just re-install anyway seeing as the original boot drive was about to become part of a RAID array. So, new Intel PRO/1000MT adaptor, one 20GB to boot (pun intended), and two 40s to be put in to RAID 0. Sif I’m going to sacrifice half my disk space 😛

I chose to go the manual route this time, using the Debian net install disc and only installing the base system. Samba was the only hiccup of note, and Apache’s stupid alias to /usr/share/images (thanks Insidius). Software wise everything is working fine, but the hard disks are getting damn hot – and I can’t install any more fans to the case. I think I have no choice but to actually rebuild all the components in to a new (cooler) case, might want to think about upgrading that 250W power supply while I’m at it 😐 TBC.

So Windows Vista launches in less than a fortnight. I’ve been playing with it both at work and at home for the past few weeks, since the BillGates leak in December. It’s certainly a step up from XP in many regards, although for my own personal use on my gamer/server I think I’ll be sticking with XP SP1. I am running Vista on my HTPC though, as I find the Media Centre about a hundred times better than the XP version. Most of the widely known bugs (channel shifting, guide problems) have been corrected, so despite it running like shit I’m sticking with it.

Initially the HTPC had 512MB of RAM, I figured this would be enough for Vista considering all it is doing is playing back videos and streaming live televsion. Wrong. I’ve had to upgrade to 1GB, I suppose the performance is comparable to XP on 128MB versus 256MB – in other words, there is no competition.

Didn’t do much over the new year period, planned to have a bit of a party for New Year’s Eve, and received only one guest out of about a dozen invited. Since then, straight back to work, no holidays for me this year. Financially I came out not too bad, so I’m considering purchasing a new TV, currently looking at the SONY BRAVIA range, as I can get them at wholesale from a supplier through work. The only real question is the choice between rear projection and LCD TV. Both do similar resolutions and picture quality is mostly the same, however the phyiscal size of the units differs quite a bit.

Beyond that, over the last few days I have been making small upgrades all over the house. Our primary network switch is now Gigabit, however we’re still stuck using our backup ADSL modem (see previous post). Also, our fileserver has had its’ storage moderately upgraded, with an extra 250GB odd space to fill. I’m about to try installing a few old drives I have laying around (20GB, 40GB) in to our Linux server which handles all the BitTorrent downloads, I hope I can still remember how to set up a RAID 0 array and fix up /etc/fstab accordingly.