Schinckel.net

I’m severely tempted to upgrade my local server. It’s a Dell Dimension 4600, running Ubuntu and with just under 1TB of disk space.

And I’m just not that happy with it. Occasionally it still crashes, and I can’t figure out why. I don’t know if it’s to do with VMWare, or something else.

It’s not so much a running out of disk space thing. It’s more that it just doesn’t cut the mustard. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by OS X, but things just aren’t that easy to do on Linux. For instance, it took ages to get AFP sharing working, and even now it isn’t perfect. For instance, I have two shares that allow me access to some of the same files (the root directory of one share is inside another share’s directory). If I view a particular directory inside the share, then it shows me less files than actually exist in that directory, but the other share shows them all. Even if I disable the ‘outer’ share, the inner one still only shows the smaller number of files.

I found a shop today that sells 500GB SATA drives, which would allow me to migrate data without any loss, by plugging into one of the two spare slots, and installing a new OS onto that drive. I might be tempted to reinstall OS X onto the machine, but I think it was just a bit unstable too. Perhaps it is just the box.

I’d really like to move to a Mac Mini, but I don’t think I’d like to have to put a heap of external drives hanging off that again. Perhaps I should look for a cheap second hand Mac that will run OS X.