So, I was talking with a friend. Using a storage unit as a workbench is something common. A climate-controlled storage unit with electricity can be had for quite cheap. Many people use storage units as a place to work on their cars, trucks, projects, and much more. I've even heard of garage bands practicing in their very own storage unit.

We got on the idea of making a storage unit into a mini datacenter. If one limits the number of servers that are in a normal climate-controlled room, chillers are not even necessary. There are a few questions that need to be answered before I will go out and rent any old storage unit.

Connectivity

The idea of a mini datacenter is completely pointless if you can't get an Internet connection to a storage unit. Since we're talking about a mini storage unit, we'll say that ...

So a sad thing happened today. I upgraded my archlinux system, and when I rebooted for the new kernel, xorg didn't work.

NVRM: The NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra GPU installed in this system is
NVRM:  supported through the NVIDIA 173.14.xx Legacy drivers. Please
NVRM:  visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for more
NVRM:  information.  The 177.80 NVIDIA driver will ignore
NVRM:  this GPU.  Continuing probe...
NVRM: No NVIDIA graphics adapter found!

I've known that this was likely going to happen fairly soon, but it's still sad. My graphics card has been moved to legacy.

Nvidia used to have the best linux support. This legacy driver crap, while it makes sense in theory, causes lots of problems. I have a couple older nvidia cards that won't display at 1080p through their DVI port because the legacy driver that supports them doesn ...

In the early 90s, a compact disc was a very new and cool concept. You could get better quality music out of a compact disc than with a more common cassette tape. On the computer side, CDs were nice because they had a very, very large capacity compared to other removable media. Even though CDs were read only, CD-rom drives were popular in new consumer-grade computers by the time the Pentium Processor was widely used. As the format evolved, the DVD was introduced. It was designed to play higher quality video. On the computer side, it provided an even larger capacity for software distribution.

We are now in the third generation of optical media. It was engineered to support Hi-Definition video content. Computers haven't widely adopted the use of blu-ray or hd-dvd drives. DVD media is by far more common, and a DVD disk has plenty of space for ...