Online Distribution

This is a good article about online distribution.

Backup!

This last week I had two hard drives crash to unrecoverable states within 3 days of each other. Needless to say I'm now paranoid about backups. So I got a VIA EPIA SN10000EG Mini-ITX Mainboard with an on board CPU (1Ghz fanless) along with a Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis. I got 3 750 GB Seagate SATA2 ST3750330SV hard drives. Next weekend I'll be hooking it all up and seeing if this hardware is any good. My hope is to have a super low-power server that can serve my website and act as a file share. These are not very CPU intensive tasks so, I imagine the 1Ghz processor will be plenty. The only time I intend to spike the CPU is when I create thumbnails of my images/videos and transcode my raw *.dv videos into *.flv for web viewing. At this point, I'm thinking that I'll queue up these tasks and have them ran by a batch processor that executes these tasks serially and on a lower priority process. My batch processor will be simple, but I also plan to make a simple web interface into it so I can get visibility as to when to expect my videos will get transcoded (also would be nice to re-arrange task orders on occasion).