R.I.P. microwave

Not an actual microwave oven as it turns out. I bet they last a lot longer then eight years. No, back in ’09, I built my own desktop computer from components. It was a fun project and for many years it was my “production” server.

At the time, I had one of those big 17” MacBook Pro’s that I called “traytable”. So I called the server “microwave”.

Looking back, I have two regrets about that build:

• I bought a motherboard that was putatively capable of supporting RAID. Turned out it was some low-end “fake” RAID controller. I think I tried one of the straight up software RAID configurations for a while, but it didn’t last.

• The fans were too noisy. I bought big ones hoping that they could get the job done at a fairly low speed, but it wasn’t long before I described it as sounding like a jet engine at take off. I’m fussy about machine noise in my office.

It lived in the basement, first in Massachusetts and more recently at a friend’s house. (There’s no place in my little two bedroom apartment where I could have tolerated the noise.)

Sometime last year, I migrated most of my sites off of it and onto AWS. Yesterday, I migrated the last little set of static web pages onto my Dreamhost account and ran sudo shutdown -h now for the last time.

I’m going to canabalize the drives for a NAS that’s supposed to arrive on Tuesday. A QNAP TS-453A. I’m going to be really annoyed if it’s too noisy.