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.

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.

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.)

So much so that I’ve decided to not only hold onto the domain name, but there might just be a House Rancourt branded product in the Bauhaus site family in the near future.

It will capture the spirit of House Rancourt nicely, I think. It will be a cathedral, not a bazaar. It will be a repository of creative work from many different contributors. It will be a successor to my favorite part of House Rancourt, the part of which I was the proudest, and yes, by God, I will work this background into its design. It has a name, but no, I’m not tellin’ yet.

Keep your eyes here, friends. It’s gonna be amazing.

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

The first of the two new servers, MALIBU, is on its way now. UPS tells me it will arrive Wednesday — it was a very generous donation from Tim Johnson. It’s an AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.8GHz with 512Mb RAM; we’ll be supplying a new 80Gb drive ourselves, and transplanting the 250Gb iNoobz drive into it as well. By next weekend, we should be fully migrated to the new box. Shortly thereafter, we’ll be bringing in SANPAOLO, the backup server, in case we face hardware failure again.

Currently, this is all running — God help us all — on an old Dell laptop. I have faith that, in an early Pentium-M laptop can handle this load without a twitch, so can that Sempron. I pray every day that LEYLI holds together until the transfer can be made; I expect her to, but it’s still a bit scary, now, isn’t it? All this data — everything you’re reading now — on a venerable student laptop, well-worn.

House Rancourt was a wonderful ride. I was so proud of myself when I successfully built the prefab components it used — and then again, when I wrote the extensive middleware, and began carving out third-party code and replacing blocks with my own. It was truly a Borg-like gestalt entity, not merely a sum of the GPL ‘blocks’ that were recognizable in it. It had tremendous name recognition, in a way I doubt The Bauhaus will; then again, I’m deliberately stepping back the identity trumpeting, and trying to let our hosted artists shine a little more.

This is something that my detractors may well laugh at, a “selling out,” a concession to prefab engines and only moderate customization within them. I say it’s an acknowledgment of a change in direction for myself, and the world. House Rancourt is proof I can do amazing shit with Notepad (well, now BBEdit), proof that I’m capable of building really amazing things. The Bauhaus, and its family of sites, is proof that I don’t need to use others’ sites as a showcase for my talent. It’s an admission that comfort and ease of administration is once again a priority; modifications to HR were nightmarish, as they required me to re-learn all the bizarre code strategies I’d employed and forgotten about by jumping back in and praying I didn’t break anything in my thrashings. Upgrading large blocks of code, like the heavily-customized Gallery, were exercises in planned insanity. (I made it happen, but it wasn’t at all easy.)

Why did I let this happen? Couldn’t any first-year Comp Sci student tell me how stupid a plan this was, how doomed to failure it was? Oh, probably yes, but the reason was simple: House Rancourt was built originally to host my partner and I. When I built it, I did so expecting it would simply be a vanity site, albeit a really slick and formidable one. I didn’t expect to update it; hell, I didn’t expect anyone else would use it much at all. I grossly underestimated its growth, and more, its potential for growth — it didn’t occur to me that the friends I offered to host would find the applications as convenient as they did, and lean as heavily on the services as they did. This wasn’t a bad thing, mind you. It was a WONDERFUL thing. It just…made things tricky when I wanted to add new features, and my hosted talent certainly deserved every cool new feature I could provide.

I built it to be capable of grandiose and amazing things, but it never occured to me that if I built it, they would come. And they came, all right. And it was awesome.

In this new site, my role is (I hope) much more clear. I’m the administrator, and I’ll have a small personal site of my own that’s all about me, but The Bauhaus is a collection, not a singularity — a bazaar, not a cathedral. It’s designed to get you to the goods quickly and simply, and to let you focus on the talent you like, while being able to easily avoid the talent you don’t follow.

Information. Media. Family. Welcome to The Bauhaus.