Not Acceptable, Dammit! Not Acceptable!

Well, after making a yummy risotto last night (one carrot, one onion, one stalk of celery, 2 oz. of prosciutto, mince and saute for 5 minutes in 2 tbsp olive oil; add 2 cups of aborio rice and saute one minute more, add 1/2 cup white whine and wait until liquid boils off, then add 1/2 cup of warmed stock-- in our case, leftover turkey stock from the freezer-- and wait until liquid is absorbed, stirring. Keep adding stock 1/2 cup at a time until the batch is creamy but not soupy-- about 20 minutes. The intervals over which you add the stock should lengthen as time goes on, too. Once you've got the mix right, add 2 tbsp butter and 1/3 cup Parmesan cheese, remove from heat, salt and pepper to taste, and if you're feeling fancy, maybe some fresh parsley. Serve soon.) I went to try out the new newserver.

*Sigh* There are three things on which to rate a newsserver. They are retention, completeness, and speed. Drizzle's server really doesn't rate high on any of these. For the text groups, it's great. I don't object to it at all. But for the foreign binaries, like the anime groups, the completeness index is zero. I've had 100% failure over the past three days.

This morning I hacked up a new version of listgroups, my traditional script for keeping track of what binaries I've requested and will want in the future. I made some changes that ought to have improved the performance significantly. The speed is still terrible, and the completion rate is, well, not acceptable.

It really seems that I'm going to have to go al'a carte with my services. That's okay; I've needed to shake stuff up for a while now. I've gotten too soft and set in my ways.

So, sad to say, sometime after January, I'll be moving off drizzle. I'll be getting my own domain and a new server. Someone pointed me to a server with 300MB of space and a 5GB traffic limit, but I think the 100MB and 10GB traffic limit at Enki is pretty tempting for only $70/year. And that would leave me a budgeted amount for Usenet, too. Hmm.

Another whacked plan

I own an IP address. This isn't unusual in and of itself. The bandwidth is pretty small, but it's tolerable; I have easily pumped a gigabyte a day through it without a problem, and my ISP is tolerant of people running servers on their system.

In my closet, as I speak, is Kouryou-chan's own computer. It's a dinky little thing, a P2/233 with 64MB of memory. So, here's the stupid thought of the day: Is there any reason I couldn't run, say, pendorwright.com out of my closet?

Here's what I'm thinking: I'll put a third NIC into the firewall box and configure a completely independent subnet for it, and route all outside traffic heading for port 80 to the subnet on that third NIC, the DMZ. Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

I'm a little itchy about publicizing my IP address, although it's not a state secret or anything like that. And my firewall's been pretty robust. I just worry about compromised traffic; I'd have to firewall off the rest of world from the DMZ box, and control access to the DMZ, and while I'm a pretty damned fine system administrator, there's only one of me and a whole bunch of black hats out there.