March 18, 2010 Archives

Thu Mar 18 02:06:57 CDT 2010

The end of the HCC, or "The St. Patty's Day Massacre"

About an hour ago, i turned off the last three NetBSD machines i was running at home: lakshmi, brahma, and vishnu. ("HCC" stands for "Hindu Computing Cluser.") I'm writing this on mimir, the Mac mini desktop and entertainment machine. Other than the Linux appliances (Netgear (nee Infrant) file server, and the Logitech (nee SlimDevices) Squeezeboxen) i don't have any other Unix-like computers running in my house. (Well, at least that i'm aware of... oh... crap. I guess my G1 phone counts too. But you get the idea.) It feels a little weird. It's definitely quieter.

While i've been working on this for some time, it still saddens me. The monetary cost (and to a lesser extent time cost) of running this many Internet-connected servers at home had just gotten too high. It's not so much the electricity (though the Alphas do pull some amps), but rather the Internet connection. I'm paying $160/month for 12 usable IPs, 8 Mbps down and 768Kbps up. Compare that with Dreamhost's $9/month for unlimited domains*, unlimited email accounts, and unlimited bandwidth and disk quotas.

I'm sure in the weeks or months to come, it's going to feel good to be free of the responsibilites of hosting my and other peoples' data, and all that entails. It will enable me to run away and see the world without worrying that back at home, in my closet, a computer's hard disk has failed and it needs me to fix it, or the cable modem has fallen of the Internet and needs to be power-cycled.

But right now (ironically) it just feels weird to be... more "normal." I'd been hosting my Internet content on lakshmi for about eight years. The Compaq (Alpha) DS10s, lakshmi and sarasvati were good servers, and NetBSD was a good operating system for them.

* additional domain registrations after the first one is $10/domain/year, but there's no additional charge for hosting more domains.


Posted by johan | Permanent Link | Categories: unixlike