Gosh, I’ve gotten lax in updating here, haven’t I?

We’ve just migrated the Bauhaus sites to their new home on STELLA, a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz machine with 4Gb RAM and a 250Gb HD — quite a step up from the previous hardware. I’m sad to say that SANPAOLO lasted only a month or two before the legendary AMD overheating problems reared their ugly head, and we swapped hard drives, booting up MALIBU as the new SANPAOLO. MALIBU enjoyed a two-year run as the Bauhaus server, and only started showing its age when Penumbra took off, but the newer, faster box is serving up pages much more quickly, and running backups much more reliably.

Most WordPress installations have been upgraded to 2.8. (If yours hasn’t, ping me and I’ll do so.) We’re phasing out the old web traffic metrics system in favor of Google Analytics for much leaner databases and faster server response, and if you’re still using ImageManager, I’m sorry to say it’s been discontinued — we’ll be migrating back to WordPress’ stock media upload tool, with Scissors for crop and resize functionality.

More to come sooner than two years. I promise.

We’ve acquired a few new members of the Bauhaus family, in particular Lost Angles, Charlie’s journal and the American Riviera MUCK homepage. The MUCK documentation’s up there for your perusal, and will be brought up to date soon, with new features like the MUCK-wide radio code and such.

Additionally, and perhaps most excitingly, we’re in development on a House Rancourt branded product. HR is our ‘cathedral’ architecture brand, whereas Bauhaus is definitely more bazaar, and this project, which I can’t say much more about right now, is definitely a cathedral architecture project. It’s gonna be amazing…if I can ever get the database to work. New code, learning curve, you know the drill.

Ladies and gentlemen, you’re reading this on our new web server. Say hello to SANPAOLO.

It’s a damn nice box for our needs — major thanks to Tim Johnson (of Felwroth fame) for his very generous contribution of the funds for the hardware. The new server’s an AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.8GHz with 512Mb DDR2/400 RAM, an 80Gb Western Digital 7200rpm/8Mb cache hard drive, and my still-valid license of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. Once again, we’re running my favorite trio of Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.x, and PHP 5.2. The box is amazing…quiet, compact, dark and lovely, and it’s fast — indeed, I’ve never seen files transfer so quickly before.

MALIBU has been ordered, a Celeron D 3.20GHz with 512Mb RAM and a similar 80Gb/7200 rpm/8Mb cache hard drive, as our backup server. It’s more powerful than SANPAOLO, but it will still be backup — put simply, rather than running on the bigger machine and taking a possible performance hit if it goes down, I’d rather run on the littler one, knowing that if it ever goes down, its replacement can handle everything it can and more.

Aside from Stacie getting used to having a box by her knee, the new machine’s been a charmed build. (I really could do without the whole dropping-screws-in-the-case stuff, though.)

With heavy heart and not without a few tears, I’ve updated House Rancourt‘s front page with the news.
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Now that The Bauhaus has been advertised in Wasting Away Again in Lobacitavile, I note traffic’s starting to trickle in. Welcome! Not much to see yet, but glad to have you. Be sure to check out the sites listed in the Blogroll to the right; those are the members of The Bauhaus’ site community, and more are on their way. Content’s not here yet, and the sites are very much unstable and in active development.

Kind of a change from all that sand, isn’t it?

I sit here at my little metal desk from Ikea on a Sunday night, typing on my laptop. Beside me, currently serving as a purse-pedastal, is CERBERUS, the machine that once hosted House Rancourt. It was always quiet, but never this quiet. Its charcoal and silver case rests near the foot of my bed, awaiting drive scavenge. As I take its picture for posterity, I note that the sticker on the front of the box, detailing its capacities, was never removed.
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