Those of you who actually come by doylepark.net now and then (a small but steady stream if google analytics doesn’t lie) may have noticed that the site was down for a few days last week. The event that took it down was the passing of a torch. My old file/web/email server Gza was finally laid to rest and his place was taken by a young upstart named Tical.

Gza:

I’ve had this bad boy since sometime in 2007 but he was built on the bones of another Gza that came before and that Gza was built on the bones of a computer I built for my Dad sometime around 2001. This last iteration had 3 250 Gb IDE drives in a software raid 5 hosting 3 LVM volumes. It was complicated and I was also terrified of having to rebuild it. It was an Athlon 1800+ with 512M of ram. My guess is that there was something like $800-900 poured into the computer over the years and that’s just counting the parts that were still in the box and not the ones that had been removed and left by the wayside.

His downfall came when one of his drives went bad. I considered picking up a new 2TB drive and transferring all the data off the raid array (it’s a 500GB array for those who don’t know their RAID math). That plan would have cost me about $150. I gave up on it when I saw just how insanely cheap new hardware is. Here’s Tical:

That’s him behind the cable modem and next to his external backup drive. He’s a nettop with a Celeron 1300 processor, 4GB ram and a 1TB internal drive. He’s really designed for the HTPC market so he also comes with a remote and has an HDMI port and a decent graphics chip. Total cost? around $350. That’s amazing. We’re getting close to the point where even someone as cheap as myself will consider picking up a tiny PC to use as part of a random weekend project.