History of Welcome

Why are we here? Was the first question on the original Welcome page ...

Which needs to be updating to cover all my current developments following a period incarcerated at His Majesty's Pleasure. That much of the equipment listed on the old inventory is still being held by the police means that I have had to reconstruct much of the system from scratch, however since most of the website stack is based on the Linux packages provided on openSUSE this has not been too difficult in relation to the original bitweaver sites. The current catalogue of sites is maintained on the domain rdm1.uk which is used as a holding domain. In the past, common material was hosted direct on that domain, but modern browsers complain at that and I have not had time as yet to investigate if that problem can be fixed, so all the shared stuff has been repackaged for each domain. All of this was helped by having the backup servers from the original setup which the police had not seized.

srv9 is what remains of one of the original backup servers and like Trigger's broom, it has evolved over the last few months. While the machine was working back in May is was a little flaky on rebooting. After a while it refused to reboot at all, and so an second hand duplicate mother board was sourced, only to find that the processor was also a problem. The mechanical hard disk was copied to an SSD drive, which took a little time to recover everything from the original disk, but which allowed the primary software to be replaced with current builds of those packages. The machine is working nicely at present and has a fibre connection via BT to the internet.

The second server had been converted to provide a desktop since the servers were originally text only machines. Having pulled everything together to get what material I still had access to it was a little irritating when that machine was seized as it is alleged that a picture on the machine was a problem. That I was EXPECTING to have help removing this material just reinforces that there are problems with the way historic material can be handled today. I will not go into more detail here except to say that the BOOK containing the image was slated to be clean to be returned ... so go figure!

The windows computer was not seized and as this had a backup of the website material it was the basis of rebuilding everything else. It was a rather old Lenovo machine which had a slow hard disk and on board graphics along with only 4Gb of memory. A new SSD drive, doubling the memory and adding an extra graphics card has made it a lot more usable, but it will never be updated to W11 ... and since it started as W7 that is perhaps not a surprise, however it's not . up to the sort of stuff I'm used to doing such as processing videos to strip adverts and 3D CAD software.

Since there was no indication as to when this machine MAY be returned if it is decided that there are no Class C images I splashed out on a new set of hardware which is now the basis of the current desktop machine. Having been through the problems creating the original desktop setup, processing that again as a lot easier. Although I do need to rebuild many of the crib sheets to help remind me what packages to use how to configure them. While the original system had a 24Tb media server, I was back to a number of smaller disks some of which were located with the television boxes or external USB devices. To add to this set of material, there are a stack of devices that have now been returned which have provide a lot of the core video material and some music. Adding an 8Tb drive to the srv9 machine as a store for the plex media server is the base that everything else is being tidied to, and the vast majority of the physical media material has now been copied over. Handling a large quantity of paper magazines is documented on the MEDW site blog and all of that stack has now been passed to the recycling site. The rest of the material has been catalogued but is very much smaller than the original archive. Much of the vinyl collection was destroyed during the flooding in 2007 and the insurance that was in place would not replace it, which at the time was not a problem as there was an electronic copy of much of the material. The CD collection survived the floods much better but I am not sure where the vast majority of those are today as also the rest of the DVD collection.

What is next on the TODO list ... Filling in the gaps around just what I do have remaining.