As I wrote yesterday I've recently ordered, and now received a new desktop machine. For completeness I've now finished juggling machines around and installed etch twice - so now I have two working desktop machines:
- gold.my.flat (unstable)
This is my personal machine, fitted with 4Gb of RAM.
It is currently running 6 xen instances of 256Mb each leaving me with more meory free than I have ever had upon my desktop machine - so the upgrade was definitely worthwhile!.
(The previous machine had bad sockets and couldn't take more than 1Gb of RAM - hence the replacement rather than mere upgrade.)
- vain.my.flat (etch)
This, reinstalled, machine is now running only backuppc and those programs that Meg/random guests wish to run.
In terms of networking I've now split things up into three well-defined ranges. Knowing how things develop I'll not expect this to contining, but right now I'm pleased with:
- 192.168.1.0/24
- These two desktops, a printer, and any wired laptops that are turned on.
- 10.0.0.0/24
- Xen guests
- 10.0.1.0/24
- Wireless DHCP range.
All in all I'm very happy with the work of the day even if I did have to rsync stuff all over the place, juggle power cables and install Etch upon both the new machine, and the re-purposed backup machine. (Since that was previously my mahcine and was running sid.)
The following links were helpful.
- Setting up a server for PXE network booting - Used to do the reinstalls, since I don't have optical media handy.
- A simple introduction to working with LVM
- How to set up an encrypted filesystem in several easy steps
All being well tomorrow will be spent tidying the flat, drinking with my erstwhile cat-sitter, and getting ready for work on Monday.
