Tomorrow, all being well, I should receive a new desktop computer. I ordered it upon Boxing Day so the turnaround is pretty good.
Right now I have two desktop machines:
- yours.my.flat
This machine is occaisionally used by my partner, but primarily exists to remotely backup my various servers. It runs rsnapshot to do a full rsync of four machines every six hours.
- vain.my.flat
This is my day-to-day desktop machine. It is going to be replaced, and this will be rotated into the backup machine. The machine yours will sit in a closet for a couple of months then be donated to somebody local.
As with all the machines I've bought recently the new one is coming from Novatech - (Another company whos website has a suprising hostname.)
The interesting parts of the spec are :
- AMD X2 4200 processor
- 2 x 500Gb SATA drives
- 4Gb memory
The biggest difference to me will be the significantly increased disk space which means that I'll be able to remove the external 120Gb USB hard drive I currently house my MP3 collection upon. By retiring vain and moving my current desktop machine to be the "random guest machine" and backup host I'll also have a lot more space for storing backups upon. (Full database backups every six hours; I'm paranoid...)
Having 4Gb of memory will also mean that I can run more than 2 or 3 Xen guests at the same time.
My plan is to setup at least the following guests:
- sarge.security-build.xen
- etch32.security-build.xen
- etch64.security-build.xen
- etch32.desktop.xen
- etch64.desktop.xen
The desktop machines will run GDM / X11 and will be available for logins via xdmcp - so that I can have a fully seperate working environment which is pristine and easily regenerated. Giving 5 xen instances 256Mb of memory each will leave me with close to 3Gb of disk for the host and that is three times what I hav enow!
All in all I'm looking forward to the new machine enormously a bargain at ~ £290.
Tags: computers:mine, computers:vain, xdmcp 2 comments
