Natalie Imbruglia is a Whore

I'm torn.

Right now, I'm at a crossroads in server administration. It's nothing unusual, just that timeless moral dilemma: should I act now or wait until the time is right?

The details: I'm looking to entirely reformat an OpenBSD 3.4 server with 3.7...when it comes out on May 19 or shortly thereafter. 3.7 has lots of nice features, but I'm at that point where I've pretty much orphaned the poor box: it's too reliable for me to need to continually tinker with its existing services, and it's so close to retirement for me to want to start adding more software to it that I'm going to erase before June and have to reinstall anyway.

But some software is just so darn neat that I'm aching to start playing around with it immediately, and that means establishing a permanent depository for it on the Internet. So with only ten days remaining, is it worth it?

I'm torn.

Now, beta quality software is typically demanding of the newest versions of the latest libs, and 3.4 is now "woefully" out of date. "You mean it's running version 1.6? Hah! Our new software won't run on anything older than version 1.11!" Don't even get me started about Perl 5.8.0. I don't doubt that I could throw the new libs on there and get them to work, but weighing against my mind is the concern that the system is so old that compiling anything on it usually takes an hour. Considering that I compiled the same software on my iBook G4 the other day and it took so long that I got bored and raided the fridge in the meantime, it's got me thinking twice.

(An old trick: throw the same OS on a much faster spare machine, compile it there, and then rsync the finished product to the slower system and then install it. This is getting pretty convoluted now, which is why I'm so confused as to whether or not it's worthwhile.)

I'm not going to install the software if I have fewer than, say, 72 hours before I retire the server, so time is working to make the decision for me. All that stands in its way is the strength of my desire to get started with some new code now now now.