Deep Space Network

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[This page is neither about NASA's Deep Space Network for tracking Voyager nor the band, and actually has very little to do with Deep Space at all, other than massive computing power ;-]

Naming scheme for my evolving network of machines

Much has been written about the names people give to their computers. I decided to use favourite album titles by one of my mentors, Klaus Schulze, since he is prolific enough to provide lots of choices. My original scheme, back in the days when I didn't have any SMP systems, I had a convention of namimg single-CPU systems after single albums, and dual-CPU systems after double albums. This worked fine as I was planning to one day build a dual-Athlon digital audio workstation that would be called audentity, a powerful system to develop my musical identity. But technology advanced, and now that machine has finally been built with six-cores instead :-)

So now, as of 2011-01-08, the network is as follows:

audentity - 3GHz Phenom II X6 - a new studio computer is now built
trancefer - 3GHz Pentium IV, 4GB RAM, 2TB hard disks - former studio computer, now just used to transfer DAT recordings, and for website and office duties, photo-editing, music+image archive, backups
mirage - 1.6GHz Pentium IV, 1GB RAM, 500GB hard disks - email, music-playing, CD-burning, secondary backups

Retired olde 486 and Pentium II/III machines:

digit - CD-burning, secondary backups
picturemusic - music archive, photo-editing, backups
dreams - secondary backups of important text files
interface - Freesco router/firewall

I was more than amused to discover that I'm not the first to choose such names: this article on UML DMZ uses similar albums by Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream :-)

If anyone's still awake, here's my .bashrc file.