Earlier, I’d written about how I was the de facto I.T. expert for my household. Well, I recently I took steps to solidify my standing in that regard. You have to understand that there are more computers in my house than people. My MSO has a desktop machine and my laptop (I don’t know why I say it’s mine since she’s always on it). I have a desktop machine as well. We have a laser printer, a networked scanner, a color inkjet printer, a router, a print server and an 8 port gigabyte switch. As you might imagine, all of these machines and devices are networked and are able to share the hard resources: printers and internet.
The only thing we were missing was a file server. I mean if I’m going to be an IT king, I want a real empire to be king of. So I took an old Pentium III machine that I was going to trash, installed a couple of old hard drives and Windows 2000 Professional and had myself a functional file server. Didn’t need a keyboard, mouse or monitor for this machine because I’d set it up to use MS Netmeeting so I could login and get to the machine’s desktop and perform any work I needed to do on the actual machine itself over the network. I was a happy man.
This machine was a happy little member of my network family for about 6 months. During that time, I’d convinced my MSO that she should put her files (like grades and other important stuff) on this wonderful piece of engineering to take advantage of a network capability. As you might guess, this would turn out to be a mistake. Two weeks ago, my MSO calls me to tell me that the machine is making really loud noises. I investigate and recognize the loud noise is the power supply and that this noise is the signal that death is not too far behind. I tell her that I will copy her files over to my computer and install them on the laptop so she can continue working. Well, I log into Netmeeting and it tells me the file server is not accepting calls. I scream a bunch of obscenities, but tell my MSO that all is well. I bring out the keyboard and mouse and monitor cable and the hope that when I reboot the machine it comes up. Long story – short: it does and I am happy that I was able to save her data. As I turn that machine off for the last time, I vow to myself: no more half stepping with this project. Which brings me to the point of this essay.
I took delivery of a HP Mediasmart Server this past Friday and I am in heaven. It runs Windows Home Server software which is specially configured Window Server 2003 software. The machine is 9 inches high and 5 inches wide (no, that’s not a typo – 9X5X9 (See picture below)).
During the setup it configured all the machines on the network and ran a back up on all of them all around 12:30 Saturday morning. I am in lust over that. None of my machines have had a purposeful backup in years. I moved all the music and video files to it and now my MSO and I are listening to different playlist and watching different videos streaming from the box at the same time. This is what I wanted a machine to do. Tomorrow, I’m going to open it up and upgrade the memory and add more disk drives.
After all, the IT King has to make his toy even better. It’s a guy thing. 🙂