JTS Server History
So it all began with a little NAS (Network Attached Storage) with 2 500gb hard drives in by an rarely known company called ICY-BOX or something. It was great, small and we never turned it off. It would raid all the files across both drives and should the worst happen (a fire or something) I could just grab it and run out.
One day, ICY-BOX started making a high-pitch squeeling noise. Like the kind of electronic annoyance you can get as a ringtone that supposedly only 12 yr olds can hear. Well, that was apparently the first cry for help. Sometimes I would come to the ICY-BOX in the morning and find it had switched itself off in the night, one-day it decided not to start up again. Ever. It commited suicide. It was a shame, it had all our data on — I thought it had gone down and taken the hard-drives (all our work) with it.
Luckily, I had enough spare parts lying around that I could make a rudimentary server. I installed Linux (like the ICY-BOX, so it could read the hard-drives) and worked out how to set-up shares in Ubuntu. Great stuff, it all worked.
Now here’s the kicker, I bought a RAID controller off ebay but never bothered to actually hook it up. So instead I back up all our stuff to Amazon S3 whenever I think of it. Last time I did it was yesterday, so it’s pretty recent. But, recently, this Ubuntu server has started to kill itself. VNC stopped working which means I can’t even log-in and check it out and even though I can access the data fine, sometimes SSH doesn’t even let me in. I have to hard-restart it.
That’s a bit worrying. I have no idea about Linux really, I just know enough to scrape by, but really the command-line is not where I like to spend my time.
We’re about to upgrade our laptops to those thumping great Mac Book Pros 17” screens, you know, the ones that price tag is scary. Well, I was going to buy a time-capsule, it’s a NAS made by Apple that backs up every file ever from your computer wirelessly and lets you access your files remotely (which is great because we want to start travelling the globe, working remotely).
Time-capsule recently got an article on Engadget about how after a year the hard drives just die inside. Suddenly, my dreams of a perfect set-up died.
Anyway, yesterday Apple released a mac-mini “server”. Great news! 2 hard drives, we can get them to mirror each other and also provide Time machine support over the air, but because it’s a server, it can also host all my dev sites (and I can put them online because we just got a static IP address) and it can do a whole bunch of other stuff while being really energy efficient (so we can keep it on all the time), web accessible, SVN server — the lot. We can get some enclosures for the old drives and attached them via USB for additional space.
Now that’s why I’m psyched about the mac-mini server. It comes out of nowhere and solves all my problems and makes life a lot easier.
Here’s the dumb thing though, they cost £799 in the UK. But! Josh is in San-Francisco mid-November and in the US they cost the equivalent of £609. That’s a sweet saving, so he can pick one up when he’s out there and boom. We’re done!
Old laptops will be donated to Hugo and my Dad, old server will be donated to either of them that wants it.
