Woohoo! The server box lives…in glory! After really not all that much fiddling, I managed to get DHCP working! I believe there was a version difference in addition to the previously attempted setup which made the largest difference. But it works, and everything on the network (including the laser printer) now receives its IP address from the DHCP server. I’ve also left a few addresses open on the intranet so ‘temporary’ or ‘visitor machines’ (e.g. laptops and such) can magically plug in and work properly. They won’t necessarily have the SMB connectivity of the more permanent machines, but they will be able to go online and also FTP things around the network. Hooray for me.

In addition to that, I managed to pretty much get everything else reconfigured with the server box. And with that said, it was time to get scheduled backups in place of the more important stuff (.conf files and user data) so we don’t run into this server hard drive dying problem again, which also didn’t take that long. As I don’t have a tape backup system available, though, I did another semi-innovative thing: backup over SMB.

So what does that mean? It’s pretty simple, actually. I made a mount point specifically for system backups. The only difference is that it’s a network mount point (e.g. on my windows box). While the world is never perfect, this seems quite suitable for me. Mostly because 1) backup files are stored on a different physical machine, and 2) chances are if one machine goes, I’ll still have the other. If for some reason there’s an act of God which takes out both of my machines (which would have to be pretty severe since I’ve done pretty much everything you can do to prevent power sags/spikes and surges for the entire network), then I’ll chalk it up as bad luck and redo it all over again.

With that said, I’m going to wrap up this post and work on the TWiki Upgrade.

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07