Yesterday I bought a new DSL modem, a cheap D-Link modem with no fancy functions, to replace an old, faulty speedtech modem. The old modem had a tendency to fail silently for several hours and then come back online again. This did of course cause that this blog got unavailable for long periods of time, and that Google’s pagerank system voted down my site from being the #1 result when searching for “Etnoy”, my pseudonym.

The new modem was a breeze to install. The manual said that I needed to configure IP addresses, DNS servers and everything, and I was prepared to edit a lot of settings on the router/webserver machine. I unplugged the old modem, and a couple of seconds later the new modem was installed instead of the old one. Immediately the traffic indicator started to flash, showing that internet traffic was coming through. I was surprised to see that it seemed to work, and couldn’t really believe it.
I logged in to one of our computers and went surfing. To my great surprise, the modem actually worked! It is now located in the cellar and chugging all the internet traffic very happily. For the first time I am actually impressed by D-link, but let’s see during the next couple of weeks if it will work.

Recently I bought my computer I have been using at school, a Compaq Evo with a Celeron 1,6 GHz processor, to use as my primary desktop machine, “lysboj”. Even though it was equipped with 512 MB of SDRAM memory, it did only cost 500 SEK (that’s about 55€). Now this machine is located under my desk and works just the way it should. It is a bit loud, though, but I think that I can replace a fan or two to hush it down.
The purchase of this machine enables me to start replacing the webserver with a new computer. I have had the gentoo distribution on it for a long time, and as a router/webserver I have not felt this as being the optimal solution. Gentoo is still too much bleeding-edge to be used as a mission-critical server, and I have for a long time needed to reinstall the software bottom up using Ubuntu. My old desktop machine, a Dell Optiplex with 1 GHz, is the same type of machine that broach is now, and I can therefore install an identical system on that box to later on transfer the hard disk when the install is completed. I cannot risk having the server go down more than 24 hours, so I must do some paralell testing of the machines before I continue.

I feel that I need to give a presentation of all the servers we have at home, that is on its way.