Another One Bites The Dust

Sadly, EXP3 died today.

In fact, given its pedigree, it took EXP 1&2 with it. So I got about 48 months out of that dog, which was a Tiger Direct refurb to begin with.

I didn't actually croak. It's still operational. One of its 256MB DIMMs took a shit on itself and the box became unbootable. An fsck with bad RAM finished off the boot disk, so at this point it's just euthanasia.

It's just as well. There are far too many boxes around here anyway. EXP4 sits in a corner waiting for "something" to happen. Plus, I have a nearly 12 year old Windows domain controller that should just die and get it over with (it's so old there's even an NT4 boot partition on it). It barely serves any purpose anymore (local DNS but that's easily replaced by a Linux box).

In fact I'm starting to look at Windows as a Third World operating system these days (not sure what that makes Linux). It is a hopeless, lost cause.

But I digress.

EXP5 continues to shine. It's a very nice box and I've been using it a lot while you folks aren't using it. And sometimes while you are. I installed the HTTP Anti-Virus Proxy (HAVP) on it out of concern for all the crap floating around on the Interwebs. It, in turn, shoves everything through SQUID, which lives on BOT House.

I'm not convinced it's a robust AV solution, being based on ClamAV which is very e-mail centric, but I felt I needed another layer of protection after seeing all the trouble the fools folks back at the Salt Mines have been getting themselves into with their wacky Web browsing habits. So far it seems all I can detect are EICAR files (you will get a warning from your AV on that link, but it's just an AV test file).

There's never a virus around when you need one.