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.)