One of the things I should do this year – which I may or may get to – is to consolidate my home computer tools.

What do I mean by that?

Well, I’m basically a web guy – I have two main sites of my own (geistlinger.com, and littleghost.com – which isn’t much but for my blog and my photo gallery).

With the exception of using Blogger to generate the actual blog part of my blog site, I have a slew of tools at home that run at periodic intervals to update various portions of both domains.

The trouble is, when I first began hard-core, dynamic web sites, it was in a Windows NT/SQL server environment. So I have a bunch of older tools that run against Microsoft SQL Server (off a 7-year-old box) and posts data to various regions of both domains.

Now I’m more of an OSS dude. All my tools now are LAMP (Perl and PHP), with a healthy dollop of shell scripts. I want to convert the Windows tools to my Linux boxes, but that just takes time.

Will make backups a hell of a lot easier, however. Scripting backups on Windows is a pain in the arse.

Right now, the Windows tools – thanks to the years of tweaking – work very well, so there isn’t a real impetus to make the change.

I just want to, at least eventually. I want one master Linux box that does the work and a secondary box for backups/failover.

We’ll see how that goes…