There was a time when water cooling was bleeding edge technology used by overclockers. It looks like HP is ready to bring it main stream into the the server arena. I read this over at ZDNet.
Hewlett-Packard plans to begin selling a water-cooling system next week to address the power and heat problems that new technology inflicts on computer administrators.
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This is an adaptation of How to Assemble a PC written by Gavino at Extreme Tech Support. It is always a good idea to have a server at home to test out new versions of software or hacks to the software that you use to run your community. By testing on a dev server you don’t sacrifice your live site. Once you have tested everything and are satisfied there will be no problems when you upgrade you can easily transfer the files from the home server to the live server. You don’t need top of the line hardware for your test server. In fact you can use an old PC instead of building a new one. Of course if you choose to use an old PC you have lying around you’ll want to make sure you use the newest versions of server software and tools.
One of the most crucial tasks facing an admin is backing up your data. Many admins work very hard at keeping the servers running at peak performance and keeping the software up to date. However, many forget the most important task. Backing up the data. Yes we all sometimes forget to do a daily data backup. I used to forget about backing up the data daily until one of the databases became corrupt and unusable. I had to roll back to data that was over a month old losing hundreds of users and thousands of posts. There are many automated tools to help us with the task. This article will explain how I use rsync for Windows and sync2nas to do a nightly backup of all my data.
