Well, the box running dotblag.com, while plenty serviceable, is showing it’s age. I’ve ordered a pretty large machine (just short of $3000 in total parts) and the bits are on their way, woohoo! I’ll be setting it up and burning it in over the next month or two. Once it’s ready dotblag will be moving to it. I’m still not sure exactly how the software’s going to be, but some sort of master/host OS with virtual containers to run stuff. One for my email, one for the Freenode IRC server, one for webserving/this probably…you get the idea. I’ll probably be trying out the now free VMWare ESXi, and Nenenta core. I’ll actually probably be “donate”ing the machine to the Nexenta guys during their hackathon. I’ve kinda leaning towards Nexenta, being I’ve been a Solaris or FreeBSD guy at heart for a long time, but LOVE Debian’s APT system. Nexenta is OpenSolaris, with APT/dpkg, which is probably about as close to sysop nerdvana as you’re going to get! I have yet to play with it but from what I gather it’s zone’s support not only lx (Linux Solaris Zone) but Xen. Or something like that.

I’ll try to keep this updated.

But Mr. SysOp, how lame are you that it’s going to take months to setup a machine?! I have a day job folks. A BUSY day job. Doing SA work in my VERY limited spare time is hard, and not very attractive. So yes it could take a while. I might throw up Nexenta or the free ESX and find out I hate it. I want to have time to play with those options before I commit to moving live services to it. Once I do that I’ll be totally stuck with my choice, warts and all.