My plan for last weekend, to re-pave my Zaurus and test drive some alternative ROMs, didn’t quite work out. Instead I started the prep work for re-paving my Debian/Linux box (bovine) because I have violated one of the principal tenets of Systems Administration.
Never experiment on a system you are not prepared to rebuild.
Bovine fills many needs for my household: it acts as a router, firewall, caching nameserver, and SMTP server for all of our PCs. It’s also my private IMAP server, holding all of my e-mail archives dating back to January of 1998. And I keep a local mirror of Debian/Stable on it, because apt-get is a zillion times better when you don’t have wait for packages to download.
Bovine has also been my junk box, where careless use of Debian/Unstable packages has broken many things — X, KDE, and GNOME come to mind. There are also a bunch of packages on there that I no longer need — like CVS and MySQL. And then there’s MythTV, which I could never coax into working.
My goal is for bovine to become a disposable router, firewall, caching nameserver, and outgoing SMTP relay. Should the urge strike, I want to be able to drop a boot CD into bovine and have it automatically rebuild itself from scratch in under 30 minutes without the possibility of losing any data. To remove the temptation of storing any important data on bovine, even temporarily, I will replace it’s 30GB drive with something much smaller from my junk parts collection.
Bovine’s other functions can be migrated to my XP desktop. VMware can handle my need to have multiple Linux playgrounds, but I’m leaning towards using Cygwin for the important stuff, like IMAP — I don’t want my e-mail archives stored in monolithic and opaque data files, a VMware virtual disk would barely be an improvement over the Outlook PST files they once lived in…
