Thanks to donations from supporters and people whose websites I host, the hardware for the new ohno.mrbill.net server is in place and the Comcast Business Class line with static IPs was installed yesterday. The current server will remain in-place until the end of the year, giving me plenty of time to migrate content without having to rush. I will also be hosting two “machines” (converted to VMs) for a friend on this system; he has paid for a good part of the hardware and is paying for the Comcast installation fee in exchange.

Antec Sonata Proto case, Corsair VX450 power supply, Gigabyte motherboard, AMD Athlon II x4 640 CPU, 8GB RAM, and pairs of WD Caviar Blue 250G and Caviar Green 1TB drives each mirrored in a RAID-1 configuration.

Thanks to the users of the SunHELP website and mailing lists who have donated enough to cover the existing colo facility fees for a couple of months! This lets me leave the machine as-is while I do a gradual peaceful migration.

I’ve decided that instead of going with another “favor from a friend” hosting deal or discount, that I will be getting a Comcast Business Class connection with static IPs here at home (in addition to the ATT Uverse line I have for my “personal” Internet use), building a quiet and energy-efficient multi-core x86-64 system, and hosting everything there. All current sites and services will move to the new machine with no changes; all you’ll see is a different IP address once the DNS propagates. This also means direct physical access to the hardware in case of problems.

Due to Oracle’s policy changes over the past few months, I will *not* be able to host SunHELP on a Solaris system! This is strictly a hobby and labor of love, and I cannot afford to pay for a service contract that would give me access to security patches and updates for Solaris x86. At this point it looks like the OS of choice will be either Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Server 10.10 (opinions and suggestions welcome, in email). The existing T1000 system is way too loud to run in a residential environment.

In any case, the current system isn’t going anywhere till at least the beginning of the year, and I will keep posting updates. Thank you for your support over the past 13 years.