My longest-serving workhorse, a Compaq Proliant 1600, died during Windows security patching last night. After installing one batch of Windows 2K updates, I rebooted it; it proved to be one reboot too many for the old server. Now it doesn't even make it to the power-on self test; the drives test OK at power-on, but no signal gets to the monitor or keyboard, so I figure the motherboard is toast.
For the most part, this is not a crisis. I had transferred most of what I work with on a daily basis over to the 120 gigabyte external Firewire drive plugged into my Apple G4 Cube a long time ago. The Compaq's usefulness as a software testing machine, given its horsepower, was limited.
But the Compaq was my last remaining wholly owned Windows server; I hardly ever shut it down other than to reboot after a bug patch (which, in recent months, has become almost a daily event). For a time, it was my household's primary digital asset store, with much of its RAID's 10 gigabyte storage capacity dedicated to digital photos and the shared family music library. And it hosted the household intranet.
So now I face a painful decision: do I take it down to the Little Shop of Hardware and attempt to have it resurrected? Or have its innards transferred to another machine? Or do I pay to have it put down? Or do I put it in the closet and wait for it to decompose?
Considering how decentralized my household IT architecture has become over the past two years, I'm not sure I want to do anything more than recover what little data I care about on the Compaq and consign its case to use as an artificial oyster reef or something (and, of course, the rest of its parts to some dignified and ecologically-correct rendering process). Once upon a time, I needed an in-house web, file, and print server; now it's all peer to peer file and print sharing, and everybody's got an e-mail address to send stuff to. It's less efficient storage-wise, sure–but all the client machines in the house have at least twice the storage capacity that the server had.
It makes me wonder if there's such a thing anymore as a workgroup server–outside, say, the media business. When software like Groove has “virtualized” shared storage, and even laptops now come with more than 80 Gb of storage, it takes some pretty serious file-sharing requirements to justify any sort of centralized storage. In fact, the only reason I can think of most people wanting a file server is for centralized data backups–a job served better by a network-attached DVD-R than a multi-processor server.
Over the operating life of my now-deceased Compaq server, I've outsourced my e-mail and web servers to my ISP, eliminated the need for any sort of local web caching by getting better and cheaper bandwidth. and shifted most of my storage burdens to the five other computers in the house.
I've ditched FrontPage and ASP for Dreamweaver and PHP; I've ditched Visual Basic for JavaScript and PHP, since what little software development I do now can be done for the most part for the web browser. I've (mostly) ditched Office in favor of OpenOffice and AppleWorks; in general, I interact with Windows only when I have to run a new security patch on my son's XP machine (Unfortunately, you still need Intel and Windows for most of the really cool games out there). My NT Admin muscles are atrophying.
And I think I'm happy they are.
So why exactly am I mourning the passing of my server? Maybe it's a co-dependency thing.
Apple just sent me an iSight–the video conferencing camera designed for use with Apple's iChat A/V, for evaluation. It's zero-configuration video conferencing for the masses (or, at least, the masses with iMacs, iBooks, PowerBooks and the like). And thus far, it's been great.