Moving Servers

Brought the Beast back home today: the Dell PowerEdge 1600SC server that houses www.keithbluestone.com, www.sbluestone.com, and a few other sites. It had been at my mom's place since I moved to Baltimore, subsisting on a decent diet of SpeakEasy ADSL at 3Mb down and 768K up (~$100/mo). I found that I could upgrade my home Internet (Comcast residential, ~$50/mo) to Comcast Business (6 Mb down, 768K up) with a static IP for only $30 more per month, saving me about $70/mo and doubling my download bandwidth.

So today I redirected the DNS mapping via www.GoDaddy.com, brought the server over, fired it up, assigned it a local static TCP/IP address, opened up port 80/HTTP on the firewall to let internet traffic through to it, and rebooted. Bam -- worked perfectly the first time.

The Beast is a purebred production server: housed in a solid black Dell case, running SCSI plus mirrored 180 GB RAID drives on Windows Server 2003 and SharePoint Services 2003. No Microsoft Office; no special video cards or drivers; no pretty themes; just a server. And I have never had a problem with it in the three years it's been up.