library clouds in the sky with [diamonds]?

Bacon…

Sorry, had to get that of the way. Those who know, know. Those who do not, oh well. I will address it later… subtly???

Awhile back we got hit with the perfect-downtime-storm. A RAID controller battery randomly failed, and I was down for quite a few hours. Then a day or two later … a brown-out occurred. Somehow, some way, this killed the brand new RAID controller on the DB server, and disemboweled the RAID controller on the web server. I was down for almost a week awaiting repairs vendors and IT. During this period of utter embarrassment and fury, I finally took somebody up on a long-standing offer to put all of my digital collections stuff on a BEEFCAKE server. I ordered my [twin node] BEEFCAKE and decided that high availability and redundancy was the way to go.

So, I began building a proof of concept: Tomax & Xamot [LAMP with hint of wonderful Tomcat, Java, Solr, and Djatoka for blooming ideas] are my sinister production machines with Heckle & Jeckle [HAProxy & KeepAlive] providing the load balancing. After many hours, the proof of concept succeeded. Kill apache and/or mysql on Tomax, Xamot will be right there still fighting for the Cobra Commander.

I’ve been sitting on BEEFCAKE for a week or so, almost ready to go to production. But for the last week, I have been diligent with my 99-part hearty diet of bacn, Batman, Green Lantern Corp, and Promethea. Combined with the nicotine patch, my head has been in the clouds - in a good way. I was pretty undecided about the Cloud for a long time and Stallman’s talk at U. of T. threw me even farther to one side of the fence {GPL loophole], but Fink’s idea-machine-brain rambling on about creating a Cloud at LibMac (another possible proof of concept) started turning gears. (Side note, Fink is more rabid about Open Source than I). The collections within the Digital Collections, (namely PW20C, Concentration Camp Correspondences, Bertrand Russell, Canadian Publishing, et al) are sitting on a fair chuck of metadata begging for something to be done with it. Add that to the Mass Digitization Project (DC, METS/ALTO, and fingers crossed TEI), and EVERGREEN!!! Oh what to do, what do to???

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