Machine reloading
*yawn* It's now a little past midnight, and I'm pretty close to finishing up the preparations for swapping out my failing Pentium 133MHz router for a far more solid 1U PIII 800MHz. I can't believe I'm finally replacing that old machine; it's held up (in various incarnations) remarkably well for quite a few years, having originally served as my primary desktop many moons ago. It, along with a similarly low-powered machine, will probably be repurposed for the OS-of-the-week (I've been wanting a machine to poke around with OpenBSD on, and I really need to get Debian installed somewhere so I can start messing around with deb packaging). I've been having a hard time with the idea of throwing this much hardware at a router, but the ipchains (now iptables) rulesets are starting to get a wee bit more complicated, it's running squid (poorly, currently, but the new box looks to be quite up to the task), and I'm going to be running a couple of VPN connections from the machine in the next few weeks, so I guess it's about time.
The other one...
The 1U machine (insert blatant plug for Penguin Computing here) came with a brother, so I'll be tackling that one next as a replacement for the dual 400MHz HP Netserver LPr that currently suffers from more than it's fair share of PCI problems (due in no small part to a shoddy PCI riser card). If I can get the PCI problems resolved on that box once the new one is in place, it'll make for a very nice database server.
Naming conventions
All of this has lead me to reconsider my naming scheme. I've been borrowing from a particular Greek myth ("labyrinth", "minotaur", "talus", "minos", "gatekeeper", "daedalus", etc...you get the idea), but as with all things aesthetic, I get bored easily. ;-) So, I'm tossing around ideas for new names for everything, since damn near everything seems like it's getting reloaded this week. Current theme ideas include Tolkien references, Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy (our dog is named "42", so I may have already abdicated this one to the pets ;-), major geographical landmarks, and a host of others, but I can't help but feel that they've all been done to death. Must sleep on it.
WikiWikiWeb 'til you cain't Wiki no mo'
The award for "cutest use of a revision control system" goes to gstein for SubWiki, a WikiWikiWeb written in Python, using Subversion as the page repository. It's not exactly feature-complete, but it's a very good starting point. I need to sink my teeth into this thing so I can stop installing PHPWiki all over the place (my better half already has one for personal use and one installed at her work).
Job Front
Had a promising initial contact and HR-level interview with a trading firm downtown regarding a lead Solaris administration role last week; now I'm just waiting for a follow-up. Gah. Sounds like an interesting position in a high-transaction environment, which would get me back into a solid infrastructure role again, but I was really hoping I could find something that wasn't downtown. Mind you, at this point, I'll take whatever I can get. (Again with the plug: if you're looking for someone with a solid background building and maintaining highly-available, highly-visible environments running just every modern flavor of UNIX and a variety of network gear, system software, and programming environments, drop me a line.)
Personal
Getting bogged down, although having a project again (see above about reloading damn near every machine I own) is definitely helping. Unfortunately, it's just about crunch time; if one of the positions I'm working on doesn't pan out very soon, I'll probably be asking if you want paper or plastic. Bah. Time to stop thinking about it and go to bed.