Miracles Do Happen

I am not particularly religious but I was saying "amen" this afternoon. The reason - my new Server arrived.

I had given up hope on it. Ever since my original memo with attached quotations to purchase one over twelve months ago was knocked back and then my subsequent memo with the revised plan to just get one server and not two was buried somewhere in the paper work structure of the uni, I figured that it was never going to come. A few follow up memos this year and no response. Perhaps the price tag was a tad optimistic, all K27,000 of it.

Then all of a sudden I get a call this afternoon to come and collect some big heavy boxes. I had no idea what they were talking about. I went over and still did not believe they were mine. Only the other day when asking the boss what the story was with it he told me the uni weren't going to buy it until we sorted out budgeting after the extension work we are still doing.

I still do not know who put in the order to buy it, or how long ago, but this machine has been slowly working its way to me over the last few months. They were shipped from down south somewhere and then on to us.

Now I get a chance to really notch up a gear.

For the techy minded people, the gear is pretty good. It is an Intel Stanyon Server, rackmount 2U high, 2 Gigs of memory, RAID controller card with quite a few harddisks - somewhere over 100gb (I have forgotten). I will mirror a couple of them and stripe the others. Comes with a 1kVA APC UPS, and DVD burner for back-ups (tape backups are worthless here). All good fun. Now just have to get Linux onto it. Another learning curve to climb.