Once more, into the breech

I have been informed that my web page, now more than a decade old, will cease to exist soon. The machine that hosts it (www.caip.rutgers.edu) is "being retired". What's really going on is a typical academic stunt of changing names and seizing control. It's evil, but it's what happens in academia regularly. Life goes on.

So, I am preparing to move my web page to a new web site: but where? After considering all my options, it appears that the best option is to host it meself. Allow me to explain: First, why should I pay someone to host my fiiles? Second, if I ask Verizon for a static IP then I have to be a business (and be prepared to pay for the privilege). So, it would appear the cheapest thing to do is use dynamic DNS and host at home.

OK, so what next? Well, it wouldn't hurt to have an industrial strength router, but that's a story in itself --- next blog. So, besides the router, what else? Who's hosting the web page? No way is it my machine. But that's why I have a vax. Really! So, if I can have openbsd on the vax (which I can, to hell with VMS), then I will host from there. If anyone complains about the speed, then I'll tell them they don't have a sense of history.

So, then how to port openbsd on the vax? Wellllll, the "best" way (according to the web page) is to have it netboot. So, I could port over all the daemons to do that, but then since I need to bring up my Sun machine anyway to talk to my T3 fileserver, then why not have the Sun serve? And, what's more, it appears that Sun does this stuff regularly under the name "jumpstart".

Next step? Putting Solaris 10 on the Sun. I thought about netbsd, but if I want it to the talk to the T3, why not have it stay in the family. And I'm just getting started...