SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

February 10th, 2009 - How I lost my mind and ended up with this:



This is what happens when you decide to take stock of everything that you are running at home, when you don’t keep track closely.

I kid you not. This does a real good job heating the basement in winter time, as a matter of fact my better half has been getting lower electrical bills as a result. I ran two additional circuits from my house’s electrical panel to run all of this. I will probably reduce the number of servers soon, mostly because I’ll be able to get dual Xeons on the cheap on eBay. They will heat a bit more, but three of them can replace the six CentOS boxes.

There’s a reason to this madness; most of these older servers are running IDE drives, and they all tend to go bad sooner or later. So I’ve built redundency in the infrastructure - sort of.

What’s missing from this grand plan? Backup power. I had a few UPS units, but most of them have gone bad. My biggest expense this year will be to renew my UPS pool. More on that later.