New Network Setup & New Server Gear 23Apr23

With MLC in town for an extended time he was able to build us a new "home server" for storage of whatever (especially music and image files) and hosting of a DVR (Plex), automated backups of client computers and devices, and other service software. My ancient Win 7 machine for this was no longer supported of course, but worse it was often requiring reboots... it served us very well for many many years but is now retired. Hecate is a hot Archlinux air-cooled AMD 32 core 4GHz machine with 32G DDR4 dimms and 32TB of RAID 10 commercial storage accessed via 2.5Gig Ethernet (or WiFi 6) on the Asus motherboard. It's a blazer and solid as a rock as well as impenetrable. My Linux admin skills are rusty but getting better. I have the critical stuff understood now; I don't use a UI on the server ~ just ssh into it remotely via terminal. $2,200, thanks Matt.

Here's Plex delivering 96KHz/32bit music, JRiver does it too from hecate. We can do this to any of our devices ~ even streaming to iPhones in the car, given networking mods mentioned below.

Matt even built himself a new workstaion, a new "water" cooled, overclocked AMD 16 core CPU on Asus with 2 new 32Gig DDM5 dimms and a killer AMD Radeon RX 79000 graphics card and a ton of SSDs. Performance is stellar. His prior AMD 96 core threadripper CPU on Asus will become a build server. I learned how to use Denver Microcenter (good store), apply thermal paste, install & test a cooling block and associated radiator, and strap up the motherboard connectors. As a thank you we gave him a new desktop headphone DAC/AMP called the Schitt Hel2, which is great with tough to drive headphones and it even integrates a mic connection (so you can audit what you are saying).

Our DSL bridge (& router) for Century Link was also very old and required too many reboots itself, as it ran out of memory handling the traffic for Blodgett, which has increased quite a bit with new 4K/HDR TV panels installed, and MLC being here. I had a new & modern one sent to me and we swapped the old one out. The network is much more stable now - plus we even went with open source ddwrt for routing and WiFi on our Nighthawk. The hecate server is hosting it's own VPN and we use WireGuard tunnels to gain secure & anonymous access to it's functions remotely. I'm using NoIP DDNS service to resolve my domain names to my dynamically assigned external IP address.