It’s getting to be that time of the month again, when I start whining about how no one donates to the Hindenburg fund. Unfortunately, it’s gotten to the point where it looks like Jason and I are the only ones really using it, and it’s hard to justify the $90/mo to keep it operational.
So, I’m starting to think I need to start selling some services on the box in order to get a regular flow of money coming in. Cheap virtual web hosting seems to be the easiest to do, if I can find buyers who would rather go for my little locally hosted box over one of the larger services. $10/mo seems fair to me, and at that rate I only need to get 9 customers to cover the hosting costs. If I could even get 3 or 4 it would be a big help.
If anyone has ideas for other services, or would be interesting in hosting, let me know. I suppose I should do this in some sort of official fashion via 2 Bit Hacker Consulting.
I finally got around to setting up a donation page for Hindenburg. Since we (read “me”) are paying for hosting now, we’re asking for people who use Hindenburg to help out with the hosting costs. I’m not all that worried about it, but for the past few months I’ve been paying the $90/mo out of my pocket, which is kindof annoying.
I’m pretty happy with how the bar graph turned out. I hope people keep donating enough to fill it out with some nice looking data.
Also, we’re starting to re-enable accounts that were on Hindenburg before the move, so if you had an account before and want it back, shoot me an e-mail or drop Jason a line. If you didn’t have an account before, but would like one, do the same thing, I guess.
It’s been a fairly geeky weekend for me so far. Friday night I helped Jason get Hindenburg back on it’s feet after an OS upgrade, which allowed us to finally start using the two 250GB Serial ATA drives in it. So far we’re only using one, the idea being to mirror the drives for a bit of data redundancy. It seems to be mostly working again, though some people are having minor issues with various web things. It was a fairly major upgrade, so I guess this is to be expected.
Yesterday I ended up taking my gaming system apart, originally to just put another hard drive in it, but I ended up spending some time to get the cabling a little bit neater, and I think it looks a lot better now. The downside is that it doesn’t seem to have enough power to spin both hard drives when I start playing a 3D heavy game, so I think I’m going to need to throw a bigger power supply into it.
That got me thinking about all the other hardware I’ve got lying around here, and I started coming up with a plan to reallocate some stuff so everybody is happier. I figure I’ll take the guts of the HTPC and make a new computer for Delia, since it’s faster than both her current comps, then we can move her old Dell back to her office. I’ve got an older Shuttle box from work that I think I’ll put the PVR card in, and use that as an HTPC for a bit. Not sure what I’ll do with all the leftovers at that point. I’ve been meaning to build a home storage/print server, so maybe I’ll throw some stuff toward that. I should still have enough parts after that to build one more system, maybe I’ll build it and donate it to someplace for Christmas.
Still haven’t gotten the OpenBSD box in place as a router, and now that there’s a new version of OpenBSD out, I think I’ll redo the box from scratch again. It wasn’t that hard to get stuff installed on it. Just need to actually get it done, since I’m sick of the Netgear thing crashing all the time, and I’d like to be able to do some bandwidth management for the VoIP line and whatnot.
