Got up this morning, and hurried to my computer to check the shipping tracker page for my server. No updates since yesterday morning, so I thought it was a lost cause and wouldn’t arrive today at all. Oh well. Go about my usual email checking, oldest email first, nothing more than my usual cron mailings, Snort reports, etc… Until I get to the last message from the voicemail system at Oracle (yes, email, phones, and faxing are all intertwined at Oracle). The delivery man came round at 8:15 and could I please give him a call…

So I ring the guy, and he’s still outside (why??); he waited the half our it took me to get out of bed. Whip on my dressing gown and run down the stairs, sign for it, have a quick chat, and excitedly run up the stairs again. Jump in the shower, have a quick breakfast, then whip it out.

Now I knew how wide it would be, it’s a standard 19″ rackmount size. But it was about twice as long as I thought it might be… How much can they actually put inside it?! Pop open the cover, put in my extra memory and hard disk (no! they provided a floppy drive caddy for the thing, even though there isn’t anywhere to plug one in or let the drive poke out the front…), and sit it on my desk, under Arcadia, the screen, and the keyboard.

Finally, I plug everything in and turn it on. The room is filled with the noise of a jet engine! If you’ve ever heard a Dyson vacuum cleaner before it’s a bit like that, but with an added high-pitch whine! After a couple of seconds the fans are slowed to a much more reasonable speed at which you can actually hear yourself think, but is still unusually loud for a computer. Never mind, we should be able to live with it…

I haven’t had time to install anything on the thing yet, so that will come this evening. I do, however, still need a name for the machine! Please submit suggestions in the comment box! Please!

How about this for incentive: the winner will get free hosting for life! (terms and conditions apply)

So far, reasonable suggestions include:
pollux
gaston
baldrick