First Server - Meh

Putting together this first server is not going as smoothly as I thought it would.  I have yet to get the OS loaded onto the system.  First there was no optical drive bay, then we had problems getting a USB CDROM to be detected, now I'm having issues getting the CDROM to be picked up on the IDE ribbon cable.  It's just one thing after another with the project.

Time to Revamp

Got a dose of cold truth: my reel isn't up to snuff.  After watching it, there's just a lot of really old work on there along with work that isn't my best.  I've decided that it's time to archive it and update my demo reel by starting from scratch.  I will only include work from Black Ops, but nothing further back than that.

The plan is to make 4-6 scenarios and do variations of each, a technical demo reel primarily with rigging and motion capture, and a a short animated sequence (hopefully fully rendered).

I'm at the starting line. Go!

HydraFarm - Server 1

Bought the first server on Thursday of last week (or was it Friday?).  Anyways, the server is a 2x Quadcore, 2.66GHz Xeon , 16GB RAM, and 2 500GB SATA drives.

The plan is to load Windows SBS 2008 and Exchange on this server.  It will act as the customer portal (using Windows 2008's portal configuration) to allow users to upload/download and submit jobs as well as control account information and payment information via  secure connection.

Two draw backs to this: users will have to submit a form for account creation which will have to be hand built (safer and keeps away bots), and files will have to pass through the SBS to their final destination (end user or user's NAS folder).

I'll plan around that for the next hardware migration in a few years.  Regardless, I'm super pysched!