The electricians came today to add a power panel, outlets, lights, and switches to the garage, bringing us one step closer to completion.

We have two steps left. The electric company needs to add a meter and connect the power to the grid, and the city needs to do their final inspection.

In addition to adding the electric goodies in the garage, the electricians did an upgrade to our house mast, which probably should have been done during our remodel in the early 2000s. We built a whole second story, and instead of moving the power line up 10 more feet, they left it just 10 feet off the ground, so when we built our 19-inch high deck, the power line was reachable if you stand about 6 foot tall.

To do this, they had to kill the power to the house. While they had the power off, I zipped to the store and grabbed a little more RAM and an additional HDD for the server I'm now using for AI experiments. It started out a fair Ryzen 7 system with 32GB RAM and a few TB of storage on a couple drives, and is now still a Ryzen 7, but with 64GB of RAM and 4TB more storage. This ought to let my CPU-only (there is a small GPU in it, but it isn't AI worthy) playground perform a little better, as RAM was the thing that seemed to constrain it. Watching while it ran queries never pegged any of the CPU cores, but did fill the 32GB of RAM with use and cache.

I had a little bit of fun challenge trying to find some cables for the drive. Since I moved my office (over a year ago) to make room for an intern we hosted, and since we put all the stuff from the garage into the house, all of my boxes have been piled with the other piles of boxes, and I couldn't find the box that had the box of spare cables from when I built the desktop that I'm updating! Fortunately, the hoarding paid off, and I found the necessary SATA bits in the box for a different motherboard.

Now I'm shuffling huge blobs of data around to use the new, bigger drive as my archive drive, and use the old archive drive as my new /var folder. My /var folder filled up the other day, as it's got all the bits and bobs that the OS uses to run and update itself and log what it's doing...and where the installed Docker defaulted to putting all of its images and volumes.

When I'm done, this handed down workstation will have a separate drive for each partition for the root, /var, /home, and my /archive. I'll probably work in cleaning up a lot of that, since I'm no longer using it as a workstation, so so much of the stuff in /home is going to (or has) run stale, and is probably better off in a cloud somewhere. The /archive is one of a few local copies of things I have from the other servers. It's also cloned on my ZFS on RAID storage on another server, some is copied to Dropbox or other cloud storage, some is sneaked into GMail (I GPG my SQL dumps twice a day and e-mail them to a GMail account where they're automatically dumped in the trashcan, where I can get to them if I need to), and I keep other stuff in GitHub (or GitLab) repositories where it makes the most sense (like software projects or some scripts and configuration).

Now all I need to do is wait for a bunch of copies to be made, edit the partition table, reboot the server, and way she'll go. I should probably also boot with a live USB in there, so I can clean the old /var files off the root drive, otherwise they'll be hidden by the mount. We'll see what the storage is like after copying everything, to see if there's value there. There probably is.