Special tip mug project

[Undertoad]

One: good news about Cellar tip mug's future. A new client of mine is going to be taking up more of the slack in paying for the rack space where the Cellar lives. Soon, the amount needed to fill the mug each month will be cut in half, and I think at that point we can give up begging.

It is not right for the place to behave like a hobo in any way.

*however*

To be addressed sooner than that! The Cellar's database server has a dying hard drive. There are several ways to address this... for different amounts of money.

$0, worst option: hope the disk lives 6 more weeks, long enough for the slack to be taken up by the tip mug.

$0, second worst option: move the database back to the same server that runs the Cellar. It'll be a little slower, but it'll be free.

$70, better option: replace Cellar database server hard drive. A big pain in my ass, but I don't count that in the cost.

$130, best option: repair awesome Supermicro server that I have* and install it as the Cellar + database

$2000, ridiculous option: buy entirely new HP server and install it as the Cellar + database

Mug donations for the next three days will determine which course of action I take. As always, donations are anonymous to everybody but me (they go to my paypal account), but you know who you are, and thank you. And, as always, if you determine for WHATEVER REASON that you don't want to or can't donate, I will never hold it against you in any way, and the anonymity is there to protect non-donors as much as donors.

As always, your greatest donation to the Cellar is your participation in it.

* Further explanation: I have a really pro server that just sits in my bedroom, a project that failed. The server arrived and would not pass power-on testing. I replaced the mainboard under warranty, but when the system still would not boot, the client decided just to ditch and buy a whole new server. They are fine with me using this one as I see fit. I believe now that I got a bad CPU, and a $130 CPU from eBay might bring it back to glorious life. It contains four 160GB SATA drives and supports newish Intel Xeon CPUs, so this is a top-quality server intended to live in a rack in a proper data center. (If the server still doesn't work after CPU replacement, I will fall back to the $70 option and leave the rest in the mug.)