New Server

I apologize for taking down Numen for a few hours! But it was for a good reason. A couple of weeks ago (as I posted) the server died, and I had to jury-rig a (slow) home computer to be the server.

Well, just yesterday a bunch of new parts arrived via UPS and I quickly built, tested and verified the new server. I took down the old one about 11am, copied over all the data, and fired up this new one just a few minutes ago.

This new box is quite a bit faster than the home computer which was the temporary surrogate, but you'll be happy to hear that it's also zoom-zoom-zoom fast compared to the original server! It's somewhere in the range of 2 to 3 times faster overall.

The computer power users might be wondering what the new server consists of. It's a very simple configuration. It's a dual core Athlon 245 (?) Athlon II 2.9GHz processor, an nVidia-based AM3 motherboard, 4GB of DDR-2 1066, an Antec EarthWatts 380W power supply and a WD Green 1TB hard drive. I was specifically trying to build a power-sipper here. My best guess -- because I forgot to bring a Kill-A-Watt to test it, is that this server runs somewhere around 85W and around 110W at peak. I wanted to get an Intel SSD (160GB Generation 2), but ... I felt that the performance gain from that wouldn't outweigh its cost (around $420). Now why does that matter? Because this entire computer, including shipping and a $20 mail-in-rebate was about $292! Nice!

Okay, enough geeking-out for now. I hope you enjoy using Numen, and as always, feedback is welcome!

Server Outage / Restored

You might have noticed that this site was down for about a day. That's because the web server crashed! Well, that's a simple way of saying something more complicated. Don't worry, absolutely no data was lost. I did, however, have to load everything up on a smaller, older, slower server -- so what that means is that the site is going to be a bit slower until the replacement server arrives. It's under warranty so it won't be a problem to replace it, but it might take a few weeks.

If anything is broken, feel free to email me to let me know!