Things To Do
My current gig isn't very busy, again, and I've been given too much free time to think of other things to do.
Of course, there are the normal chores like cleaning the basement and garage, and getting into the rhythm of exercise. Then there's the other things I put off that aren't so demanding like straightening out the "must attend to" pile of papers on my desk at home. These are the more hobby ideas...I'm such a geek.
Upgrade Server
I've got two very important servers and one less important server that all need attention.
The Sparc, the one running this web site, is woefully behind in patch management. It's running a version back of the OS (Solaris 9, not Solaris 10), although it is running up-to-date versions of the server applications (Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, etc.). Its hardware is possibly due for some upgrading, but it's running smoothly and responsively, and until some serious cash comes in to let me get a new Sun T1000 to replace it, it's likely to stay for a while.
The other Solaris box (now relegated only to e-mail) is even worse off as it's never been patched (oops), and it's still running Solaris 8, although its core applications are up-to-date. It's running on an old, old Celeron processor that is woefully a generation or two out of date. I've got a faster machine waiting to take over, although I'm thinking a better solution would be to replace my AMD64 desktop with something faster and move it into server duty. At the same time, I'd probably off-load the database service from the Sparc and put that on the new server. Additionally, this machine was never put behind the firewall, and while it's been an exercise in management and configuration, it'd be nice to slack a little bit and still know the machine is safe.
The last running server is an old, old, seriously old 486 (yes, you read that right) using Windows NT 4.0. All of the available service packs and updates have been applied, but this machine is really pokey. It's running a few web sites and nothing more. For this I need to do a little source conversion (from ASP to JSP) and move the sites it's hosting to the Sparc (the main web server in my farm). This machine can then be wiped and permanently powered off. I don't really need a Windows server any more (the few sites that are running ASP can be converted, and the one that's maintained with FrontPage I'll either work with the FrontPage extensions for UNIX, or convince that person to use some other content management system, like this blog software...).
There is actually a fourth server (another 486) that suffered a HDD failure that I've kept around for the purposes of salvaging of its "must have" information, but it happened more than three years ago, and I don't think I really miss that information.
Upon completion, I should have one Sparc running the web server software (Apache and Tomcat or Glassfish, I imagine) on Solaris and one other Solaris server running the mail and database services.
