Azekeil

This weekend I managed to rust treat and then paint the patch of rust on my old car, and advertise it with a website that takes a one-time payment and advertises with many sites until your car is sold.

The other thing I was doing was something I put off for a quiet weekend as it was risky, and would mean my fileserver was out of action until it was at least partially finished: replacing behemoth's motherboard, processor and memory with new ones, and installing the latest version of Solaris 10 (u5).

The new motherboard has PCI-X slots, and was actually the motherboard I originally wanted but was hidden away in an obscure location on the supplier's website, so I got the one I currently have. But that's not too bad, as I can now re-use that for a new version of frontier, my always-on do-everything machine. The new version will have 4GB RAM and thus be able to run virtual machines, enterprise collaboration suites, etc.

Anyway, the upgrade went well - I still have all my files - and I now have a system capable of 170MB/s write, 300MB/s read. This is being constrained by the PCI-X bus now instead of the PCI bus; I could go for more and move most of the disks on to the onboard controllers, but I definitely have the potential to max out a gigabit NIC and that's all I really need for now. Besides, I'd lose the flashing disk lights!