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.

We bought the box in 2002, with a mind for it to host SF-ARC, the Sierra Foothills Amateur Radio Community’s website, a PHPNuke monstrosity that worked beautifully, though its site router was unreliable enough to cast serious doubts upon its reliability for the first few years of its life. It was a Celeron 1.7GHz with 256Mb RAM and a 30Gb hard drive. While it wasn’t much for anything else, it was more than adequate for hosting a WAMP web server.

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.