New System...Now What?
Got a hand-me-down Core2Duo, motherboard, and RAM. Threw some other bits at it, and now have a nice shiny system running OpenSolaris.
Now what do I do with it?
A buddy gave me a zippy new system core. I added 4GB more RAM (giving it 6GB...can hold 8GB, but then I have to throw away sticks I can't use elsewhere), a 500GB drive,PSU, case I had, and a fair PCIx video card. Tossed in about $200 of parts, and downloaded the latest OpenSolaris for fun. Up in running in an afternoon.
The first thought is yet another replacement for my aging server, on which this blog is running. Or I can use it as a nifty new workstation. Or, and this is where I'm thinking of going, I can combine the two and have a nifty workstation running some services.
This server is an old Sparc IIi running Solaris 9; 500MHz of Sparc madness, with 1.6G of RAM, and about 90GB of storage. Small, to be sure.
I've half-replaced it with a new server, running a 1.8GHz Sempron with 2GB RAM and a 250GB HDD. Plan was to move all of the services over to that one, but other things got in the way, and now it's hosting some of the domains, but not the busy ones.
My primary workstation is the company laptop. "Use it like your own," I was told. Can't use it at the client, and there's nothing particularly company specific about it, so it does the job just fine. While it's a full-size keyboard, and has a killer 17-inch display at 1900x1200 resolution, the desktop has a 22-inch display ('though at 1680x1050). Small monitor upgrade, and suddenly 1900x1200 on the desktop, too.
I can partition the system using Solaris Zones, giving some separation from my day-to-day use and the servers. I'm becoming a fan in the virtual machine, and there's plenty of machine there to virtualize. Heck, I can run the entire OS of the other server inside a VM without even noticing it's there.
I've been wanting to free up the old Sparc and upgrade it to Solaris 10 (using OpenSolaris or straight-up Solaris...either way). I've got apprehensions of doing it while the system is running live. I'd like to separate some of the web servers to different virtual machines, if for no other reason than to protect one bit from another. Nothing critical is running there now, but hackers are faster than me, and I can very easily separate the web servers from the Servlet container and databases. Easy.
So, I'm setting up a zone to start with. Gonna put MySQL on there, and use one of the busier sites as a guinea pig. Maybe this one. It's mine, after all. Well, all of them are mine, but this one is personal, not professional.
Let's see what kind of dust I can stir...