For the last few years I've had a computer running 24/7, under the desk in my room, serving the various domains and services under my control. As of a few nights ago ‘ezra’, as it was known in it's last incarnation of hardware, was turned off.

Overall it felt like quite a sad occasion as the mini-itx box had served me well, and saved my bacon in a number of situations. It's also somewhat disturbing to find yourself missing the low hum of a computer, and getting increasingly pissed off at the ticking sound of your analog clock.

For those who are interested the various boxes previously had ran (in order) Gentoo, Win2000 (briefly), and then from the latest hardware; freeBSD (very briefly), Debian stable, Ubuntu 4.10 (yes, that was before the “server edition”), Debian unstable and finally Debian testing. Out of all of them I have to say that Debian testing was the most enjoyable to work with. Nice and stable, despite its name, and reasonably upto date. I've only ever had a problem when a kernel upgrade went a little wonky.

So now that Zinc has taken over (yes, a brand new naming scheme from now on), I'm somewhat perplexed as to what to do with the inners of Ezra. My primary thought was to turn it into a MythTV or Freevo box, but I fear that despite the onboard MPEG decoder, and using a hardware MPEG encoder won't be enough. My other thought is to turn her into a CarPC, or an all-in-one unit (complete with screen) and use her to take from site-to-site. As usual, any suggestions are welcome :) Either way, I'd dread to have to give her up after all we've been through (sad, isn't it?).