This is just a general update to let people know what fun the future holds around here.

I am very close to buying a new server. Okay, sure, I did buy that Pentium II Penguin server years ago (before we moved to he.net) and then never used it. And it is sitting right here on the floor under my desk mocking me as I prepare to drop some cash on yet another shiny toy. But I don't think it will dissuade me in the end.

Basically, or this is what I am telling myself at least, I am waiting for Apple to release Tiger Server (OS X 10.4). This is rumored to be announced on April 1 and delivered around the middle of the month. As soon as that happens my plan is to buy.

Then there will be some time where I have the server here and am configuring it and beginning to implement some of my new software plans. Say roughly the month of May. Then I will put it in its new home (I think 75 Broad St. here in Manhattan,) and continue to test and tweak. Probably I'll move other domains (the restaurants, etc...) over to the new box first and leave dmtree at hurricane until I am pretty sure of the new setup. Possibly we will move over sometime around the end of June.

That is a pretty speculative calendar, but that's what I am thinking. Our storage space will be immense. 1.2 TB in total (3 x 400 GB) although some of that I am going to use for redundancy so it won't all be available. Still, I imagine using at least one full drive (400 GB) for music. You can all thank Dave when that goes live. And then we still will have hundreds of gigabytes each for photos and video.

Bandwidth will increase to 1 mb/s which will be 4 times what we have now and roughly 8 to 10 times what we use now (not counting that one unusual spike last month which still didn't top .25 mb/s.) So space and bandwidth should be okay.

I am going to make lots of software changes, but I have no plans to make any low level changes to the code here, so those of you who remember scary tales of data loss from system upgrades of yore should probably worry slightly less than you might be inclined to. The main thrust of my changes will be to the large media file uploading subsystem and to the traffic logging subsystem.

Other goodies enabled by Tiger will be IMAP for email accounts (something we don't have now,) a Jabber IM server, as well as streaming audio and video servers. My first goal is to con(vince) Dave into having his own radio show.

And I would love to at least experiment with some live streaming video. A video camera attached to a laptop with an EV-DO card streaming H.264 over the internet to the server which then rebroadcasts to any connected viewers actually seems doable. Not sure what we would use wireless remote streaming video powers for, but this is NYC, and interesting stuff does sometimes happen.
- jim 3-25-2005 8:13 pm

Awesome. This is exciting. Growing room is important, and also having bandwidth to accommodate sudden spikes of interest. Keep us posted.

- tom moody 3-25-2005 9:47 pm [add a comment]


My first goal is to con(vince) Dave into having his own radio show.

im holding out for howard stern money.
- dave 3-26-2005 2:25 am [add a comment]





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