Computers have a funny way of proliferating around here. A couple of times, I’ve gone on pruning missions through the gulker.com CPUs, only to have the processor count slowly creep back upward. A couple years ago, we gave away some beige PowerMacs and moved the remainder, including our first web server (a might 66-MHz Apple Workgroup Server 6150) to a rack in the garage.

Then we began giving away or moving G3s and G4s and a couple of bare-bones Linux boxes. For a while we ran our very own home ‘supercomputer‘ that made it into the top 3% of the SETI@home project.

Now, looking around The Core, we see a dual-G5, liquid cooled PowerMac, a single-processor G5, a G4 mini, an Intel Core-Duo mini, an AMD 64 machine running Linux and a PowerMac Cube, along with attendant cables, printers, scanners web cams, KVM console etc.

These machines all have jobs: main household work station with 23″ screen (both Linda and I work from home some times), secondary workstation (17″ inch screen), Paperless Project scanning workstation, Linux experiment, Mac OS X Server with DNS et al. and utility machine (DNS, webcam deprecated Radio blogging server), but it’s getting a little cluttered here at Gulker World Headquarters.

But it’s clear we could collapse a these tasks into many fewer machines. Next project will be to re-hack The Core, maybe starting from scratch. What sort of services should the modern home network offer?

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