2003-10-28

Saturn X Freeze

First suspicious behaviour since the memory change.

New Plan

• buy 80Gb disk
• see if said 80Gb disk works properly in PII/350 shell
• if so, buy second 80Gb disk, mirror them, and use it as the server.
• if not, see if we can squeeze $1000 out of the budget for a new workstation for me, and Saturn gets the 80Gb disk (plus whatever comes in the new workstation), mirrored, to act as a server.

I don't believe that.

Power supply peak: 300W == 0.3kW
               0.3kW * 24hr/day == 8kWh/day
               8kWh/day * 0.05 $/(kWh) == 0.40 $/day
               30 day/month * 0.40 $/day == 12 $/month

Well, the units are all inconsistant, but you follow me.

And that assumes that the thing runs at it's power supply peak constantly, which we know is a lie. So probably about $10 per month is a reasonable estimate, even adding in the extras for running the switch, firewall, and cable modem. Perhaps there is some kind of gew-gaw I can buy which would tell me how much load is on a single line… since this all goes through a single power cord, it should be easy to measure. You'd think.

Still, I'd like to reduce operating requirements to a single system… that would theoreticaly free up equiptment for Kickstart experimentation.

Somewhere in the budget we need to get another 10/100 switch to replace the one which died… and finding a network wiring rack wouldn't be a bad thing either. Network Supply advertises them, maybe I should see how much they would cost.