So, Junkyardog (This being the mutant piece of computer hardware built from pieces found on a roadside… most of which have subsequently been retired) has been flakey for quite some time now. And I’ve dealt with it. Some of this has been because it’s running Gentoo, which, as we all know, kinda sucks.
But it’s kinda important. See, my initial thought was that I’d use it for backups and as an MP3 server. It turns out that it’s OK for the task of backups (Although it doesn’t reduce my need to have the stuff out of the house) but it still ends up easier to keep my master MP3 collection on my desktop. At the same time, I realized that having my own Subversion server (even for fairly esoteric things like my music) and moving all of the mail out of Outlook and onto a secondary IMAP server was useful. So, any given day, if you look at my desktop, you’ll notice that there’s some X windows open on junkyardog.
I finally hit the last straw with it. It was doing some number crunching and the “CPU too hot” siren went off. And I decided that I just don’t trust that machine anymore.
And I’ve been wanting to do some hardware management for a while now. So I got 2 hard drives (One is there to replace several drives on my desktop that are approaching the magic 3 year point) and a new CPU + RAM + Motherboard for junkyardog. Dual core + 64bit is cheap now! :)
You can bet that when I rebuild it, I’m going to start with the new drive and I’m not going to be keeping Gentoo around.