I didn't take this picture recently, as many things here aren't in true working order. But I will attempt to describe the current state of affairs in some orderly fashion. As they appear in the picture, each computer has a name: ozServe, Presario, Matrix, Mille, and XPS. The laptop above them is Quetzalcoatl, and the rack mount server is called Blade.
ozServe is my main server and it's still in operation today. It's basically my computer away from my computer. It's sporting an Intel i7-3770K. When I built it, it had 8GB of memory, but I have since expanded it to 12GB with spare memory I had laying around. I've also added a AMD R7 290 graphics card to offload graphics processing for the desktop that I foolishly installed but never removed. I'm sure it helps with some other things here and there. I used to have a 4TB external drive attached to it, but that has since failed. It has several smaller drives inside of it too. This is my main point of entry over SSH (after VPNing over to my network) and serves web pages as a dev server. It also used to be responsible for backup for my family using BackupPC (which is a nightmare to set up, by the way). I keep it on mostly for sentimentality.
The one next to it is Presario, named so because it is an HP Compaq Presario. It has some kind of Pentium 4 in it along with some small amount of RAM. What makes this computer different from the rest is that it was running Windows. I got it from my neighbor for free and I scrubbed it of any weird crap their kids put on it. But I kept the OS install just in case I needed it. I ran a bootleg copy of VMWare on it and experimented with several Damn Small Linux instances on it. That was interesting.
The one in the middle - Matrix - never had real purpose. I got it from a family friend who didn't need it anymore, fixed it up, installed Ubuntu Server on it, and toyed around with Javascript development with it.
The next one, Mille, ran Damn Small Linux on bare metal. It was basically all the poor thing could run. It had an Intel Celeron roughly equivalent to a Pentium III, so it wasn't capable of too much. This one came from a church rummage sale. After installing DSL on it, I was able to make it serve web pages and whatnot in the same way as described elsewhere on this blog. Don't actually do what that blog post does, but just know that it is possible. I also ran a FTP server on here for our security cameras to upload to back when that was the in system.
The XPS is now the security camera thing. That computer was the first iteration of ozServe until a RAM stick failed. I thought it was the whole motherboard, so a lot of time was wasted in that venture. But once I figured out exactly what was wrong with it, I put Windows 7 back on it, then Windows 10, and finally landed on Windows Server 2016 as a way to run our security program in a more robust environment. It works pretty well. It was a really good gaming computer back in the 2010s, so it has a lightweight NVidia graphics card on there. But its responsibility now squarely monitoring cameras and whatnot.
The laptop, Quetzalcoatl, ran me and my friend's Minecraft server. What a place of cringe and beauty it was. The laptop was given to me by one of the players and I was entrusted with it to install everything I needed to get it running. I got $2/month from everyone else.
Finally, the server I mislabeled as "blade" on purpose had all of OpenStreetMap's data installed on it. For a while I was into developing my own Google Maps alternative. So I wanted my own dynamic map tile server. I also made my own static map renderer and a very basic web page for it. It didn't get too far because it was slow and very poorly designed.
One thing that's very interesting is the idea of service oriented architecture here. Things talked to each other over HTTP and SSH, they were routed through different layers of switching and redirection, firewalls and whatnot. So while each individual component may not have been designed the very best it could have been, the overall networking and communication infrastructure wasn't atrocious. They're also generally asleep, waiting for a Wake-on-LAN signal to get them started. Given that the entire network wasn't moving to a unified business goal, actually calling it an honest-to-god SOA isn't totally accurate, but I'm going to do it anyway.
There are a few more fluff posts coming down the pipeline here, but I'll be back to posting real things as soon as my schedule clears up. I'll write things about the projects I'm working on for school (which is basically 100% of my school work right now) and it'll be all back to normal soon. Just gotta weather the hell I'm in right now.
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