The old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” seems particularly relevent to my recent series of catastrophes. To start with, everything was running fine on an old AMD AthlonXP desktop. It was plenty fast enough. It was rock solid. Couldn’t complain.
Then I had the brilliant idea of migrating everything to my old laptop. There were 2 things I was thinking here. Firstly, Julian is now particularly active, and pulling at cables, pressing buttons, inspecting lights, etc. It was only a matter of time before he pulled the power on the old server, or worse. I figured if I had everything on a laptop, I could put it up out of reach. Secondly, the laptop uses much less power than a desktop.
The migration went well, apart from dbmail being badly broken. It was mangling things to the extent that no email client could tell things like the subject, sender, etc of email, and also html rendering and attachment viewing was broken. Damn.
Then while I was out at the park, it ‘powered down’, never to power up again. Haven’t figured out exactly what happened, but I’m very thankful that everything was on my 1TB external drive ( ie I was booting from it ). Part of me must have known this was coming …
So now I’ve re-installed on a Dell Optiplex 2600. It’s a 2-way SMP Pentium 4 Xeon ( with hyperthreading ), giving 4 logical CPUs 
It’s not exactly energy efficient, but it’s stable, it’s fast, and it’s mine damn it, so I might as well put it to use. I actually got hold of this beast by swapping my old Apple Powerbook ( 1Ghz G4 ) for it. It sounded like a good deal. It probably was. Anyway, now I have a real server running things, for the 1st time ever. In fact, my old employer ( which I won’t link here, mostly out of pity ) could only ever afford an Athlon XP desktop system for a server.
Unfortunately, DBMail is still borked. At least now the message headers / body arrive when I fetch email to view, but the message listing is still broken, so all messages appear to come from no-one, have no subject, and be sent on an undefined date.
So anyway, now that everything other than email is now working again, I can return to some actual coding during free time. I haven’t touched Axis code for 7 months now, and am getting motivated to return to it and maybe even do an initial release of the GUI builder.