I'm in the midst of a makeover on our home's IT infrastructure. Mainly this means removing things – parts of our infrastructure were over 10 years old, and technology has come a long way in that time. I'm replacing 5 servers, a noisy Cisco 3550 switch, several routers, and some other gear with a single Mac Mini Server, a silent Cisco SG 300-20 switch, and a 3TB mirrored disk array. Ah, quiet! And small – this whole setup fits on a single 18" x 36" shelf, with plenty of room to spare.
One of those old servers I've replaced was a Windows 2003 server box – the last vestige of Windows to remain in our home. It is now shut down, plug pulled out of the wall. I could do this because WeatherHawk (the manufacturer of my weather station) now has an OS/X software package. Yesterday I installed that package on our Mac Mini Server, and set it up to report weather as a personal weather station on Weather Underground (the link will be permanently at right).
This new software installed and configured painlessly. While I can't really see how it's built, I can tell from some of the interactions that its communications protocol implementation is much better than that of the old Windows software I'm replacing. Getting it connected to Weather Underground was totally painless. There was a big surprise for me upon installing it, a very pleasant one: the software has the option of working with a MySQL database! I already had MySQL installed on my server (for my own purposes), so all I had to do was create a database and login for the WeatherHawk software and voila! I'm now collecting the weather data straight into SQL database – which means that reporting on the data is very straightforward. Win!
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