Now that it looks like I will be moving fairly soon I need to think about consolidating all of the “stuff” I own, not least all of my geeky hardware needs to be rationalised. Until recently I had 5 different computers in the house which is just ridiculous.
So today I have been gathering everything I need down onto two machines, my laptop which is really now my main machine for work etc. and the iMac which is going to perform multiple tasks at once. Firstly I installed a Windows server onto it using Parallels, that will be running all the time in the background and will be running the Domino server which hosts this site.
I’ve also gathered all of my media, music, photos and movies onto this machine as well, the plan being that it will sit in my lounge and act as a media server as well (thanks to Front Row). A rather cheap way of killing several birds with one stone. Now of course this is all a hell of a lot of strain to put on one computer so over the next couple of weeks I’ll need to monitor the performance and stability of the website. So if you see any problems that will be the source and I apologise in advance.
Of course Linux would be a more sensible option for running the Domino server, its requirements are far less hardware wise. But I simply don’t have any skills with Linux, if and when I get time to learn how to install and manage a server then I probably will switch but until then this setup seems to be running OK.
Maybe I overstated the media centre side of things, I don’t use it all the time and after a little bit of monitoring the processor doesn’t really go above 50% usage which is not a serious issue at all.
The other thing I will be monitoring is VMWare for OS X which I guess will be more suited to my requirements than Parallels. Hopefully that will be out in the next few months.