Tedious computer speak to follow. You've been warned. Moving our mail and blogging infrastructure over was relatively easy. Textdrive had support for just about everything I needed. The hard part was what to do with our photo galleries. Storage at Textdrive is RAID-5 SCSI with daily snapshot backups, but that comes at a price. The base account option only provides 300MB of storage. That's not even close to enough to host our photos. So I started looking into another hosting service. Flickr looked the mostpromising... $25/yr for practically unlimited storage and bandwidth, and a reasonably nifty API. While it initally looked great, it wasn't going to be easy transition from our old gallery to Flickr. A fair amount of programming was going to have to happen to make that work. I'd have to rework all my old blog entries which reference that gallery too. Other photo hosting sites weren't looking any easier, and I wasn't that keen on having all our stuff on someone elses server. Then I thought What about hosting the photos on my machine at home? Although not 100% kosher according to my broadband connection's Terms Of Service, word on the street said they turned a blind eye to it. There were a number of hurdles though: firewalls to traverse, dynamic IP addresses to deal with, moving the gallery software and data from unix to a WinXP box, and finally reintegrating everything on the new server. I spent the better part of the day figuring it out, and I'm pretty pleased with the end result. I used DynDNS to associate a name with my Dynamic IP. I setup my wireless router for port forwarding, and to update DynDNS when the IP changes. I used the Apache2Triad package to get Apache, MySQL, PHP5, perl, Python, and some other goodies installed on my Windows box. I then reinstalled Gallery, and tar'd up all the old photos copied them into the new install. The final bit of work was remarkably easy considering it used mod_rewrite. With a few lines added to a .htaccess file, I'm now proxying all my photos so they look like they are being served via denovich.com. It's a little slow thanks to my upstream being capped at 128Kbps, but it made reintegrating my blog a snap. The last thing was setting up a permanent redirect on AlfaWiki...