Experimental IV

It's been two years since the original EXPERIMENTAL I server went online. That project suffered from a very poor design from the beginning (a wireless UT server - what was I thinking?) but eventually smoothed itself out and now runs quite well.

All the more reason to start fucking things up!

EXP/// runs on the same old box I & II ran on, a turn-of-the-century vintage IBM NetVista desktop, with a tired old PIII running at 850mHz and a paltry 512MB of RAM. Not a bad deal for seventy bucks back in 2007 (although some would argue it was worth fifty at the time), but it's time to set that sucker out to pasture.

A few days ago, TigerDirect SPAMMED me with an offer for a "barebones" AMD64x2 w/3G of RAM, case and power supply for $139.95. They hit me right in my (cheap Son of a Bitch) price point. This was the perfect upgrade package for EXP///, so I bought it, even though I'm sure this thing will cost eighty-nine bucks by Easter.

Although this is all "house brand" (Systemax) stuff it's almost as capable as the MythTV ASUS box I built last Winter, with an extra Gig of RAM to sweeten the deal.

And, it should be at least as capable as the box I built for BOT House back in '06.

Or was it '05? Hmmm... not sure about that.

Anyway, with that kind of juice there are going to be some major changes to the structure of DinkNet. The BOT House box runs currently three UT99 servers (BOT, Bitch, and Classic3). All but BH will be moved to the new box. "Experimental IV" may actually be renamed to the original, "House of N00Bz" (but that would be false advertising... none of the current players are newbz by any stretch of the imagination), since the experiment has been over for quite some time.

This is all preliminary. I'll surely change my mind a few times before the configuration is final. The hardware gets here next week. It will likely take a week's worth of hacking around to get everything "just right" and you may see EXP3 move around during that time.

In the meantime, have fun killing people!