The drive against white noise

I’ve been trying to eradicate our living room of machine hum. For the past six months or so a noisy beige linux box^TM has provided a) always on living room internet access, b) a vmware server c) automated nightly backup of various web databases.

I’m slowly getting out of the habit of carrying my powerbook everywhere so I figured that a better solution is to have the powerbook as the living room machine (quiet, instant reliable hibernate for powersaving, and a mac therefore aesthetically pleasing!), and move the noisy box somewhere else. I tried and failed to get the noisy beige box working with a wireless card – I could have persisted but after wasting a few hours that weren’t available to waste I switched my attention to wasting time combining a few spare parts to build a windows 2000 server (i’m doing a lot of freelance MS specific stuff at the moment, was using a VM, but was finding the VNC-only access very tedious). Getting the wireless working with that was a challenge but finally got it working – flaky – but working nethertheless.

So now the noisy beige linux box will become a virtual machine on the windows 2000 server, and be eradicated from my living room.