October 10, 2003
I've got the client's server machine sitting in my living room next to my own POS. The client isn't exactly on the ball computer-wise, so I was just expecting a normal mid-tower or full-tower machine; but they went all out and got a nice-looking Dell. Five (apparently) hot-swappable drives, RAID, 1GHz P3 (not bad for being a couple years old), and two power supplies with fans that sound like Pratt & Whitneys and probably cycle all the air in my apartment every 20 minutes. I was half-expecting the lights to dim when I cranked that sucker up.
Right now I'm putting Windows 2000 Server on it; I may take a stab at Mandrake or Red Hat Linux once I make sure the Windows partition is working all right. On the one hand, installing Linux pretty much guarantees me some maintenance work; on the other installing Windows means I can just tell the client to run the updater once a week and not spend 20 minutes driving back and forth for 5 minutes of work.
