Way way way long ago (2002?) I installed what was known back then as the “e-smith server and gateway” I believe. A neat little redhat 7.x-based linux distro designed for people who were un-keen getting hands super dirty with Linux. At the time, me. Nice web-based interface, lots of community development – could function as a LAN admin box doing things like:
- mail for your own domain
- nameserving for your own domains
- webserving
- ftp
- vpn even
You get the idea. Back in the day, armed with my new shiny speakeasy dsl connection and static IPs, I decided to hell with the (not super-nominal) monthly fees for hosting, I’ll do it myself! Save money! So I got donated(*) an old pentium-something with practically no ram, 1.1GB disk, cpl of network cards. An embarrasingly poorly specced machine. Worked tho. Like a charm in fact. I was able to spend a bit of time tweaking the thing, before tooooo long I had it all doing what I needed – even with rDNS courtesy of speakeasy, I was a fully fledged Machine On The Internets! Something that I’d been seeking for many years. I even had relatively not terrible upload bandwidth (768k – ironically more than I have *now* curse on all US ISPs, bar FioS) – it felt pretty good. This happy situation lasted all the way up till about May 2005, when I had to say good bye to it all. Why? All for good reasons, but still…
Anyway.
The server went through one OS upgrade – from 5.1.2 to 5.6. I should have gone to 6, never got round to it. Hardware wise it changed quite a wee bit. First it got my old desktop hardware when I upgraded that (asus a7v/athlon something), then I believe either that crapped out or I just felt flush, got an a7n266-vm/aa/athlonxp1.8 something. A very nice 3ware 7506-LP raid set with 4x120GB raid 5. And a very nice Sonata Piano Black Silent Case to keep things hush hush.
Key thing here is, nothing original remained about the ‘server’ – not the OS, not the hardware – only the BITS! Which is exactly how it’s supposed to be, you keep the bits moving forward in time, the hardware/OS just falls away.
Fast-forward from mid-2005 to mid-2007. One of the 120gb disks in the raid array dies. I should replace that, I’m now running a 3 drive RAID-0 setup which is like flying a wet kite by copper wire in a thunderstorm shouting “Zeus is a pansy!”
Time passes.
“I gotta get a replacement 120gb drive… but these days, 500gb is normal! I should upgrade the whole thing… oh wait tho, i have a PATA raid array, these are all new SATA drives coming out. I should get a SATA raid controller. Gah, $250+, and I’d need a new MB, CPU and RAM thanks to PCI-X and PCIexpress! Even my desktop doesn’t have that! I should upgrade my desktop…” etc, etc, etc. There are what I call “upgrade cliffs” every few years (probably there is a technical term…) and 2004/2005 was a big upgrade cliff which left me 3 years out of date. Things had moved on and I hadn’t kept pace, with either the desktop or the server. It meant either a painfully expensive replacement of almost every damn bit of kit, or deliberately buying obsolete parts, and paying a price premium. A dilemma.
Time passes.
The server wobbles a bit. Then after one restart, a big phat “ZAP!” noise is heard. No more booting. No server, no internet, angry wife. “All my art data is on that! Get it back!”
Time passes.
Wife goes out of town to SF for a week, over a year since the 120gb drive failed. Time to take some drastic action.
What’s up with the server? Could just be the power supply, the box has been on for about 3 years continuously, using about 4,000 kWH maybe? could be the raid card is dead. Could be the mb or the proc. Have to figure it out – I’m going to have to suck it up, take apart the server *and* the desktop too, to plug the desktop powersupply into the server… ah hell with it. I never get a chance to use the desktop much these days anyway. I’ll give it up. Give up 3d gaming, give up surround sound (hah, haven’t had that since we left the loft in early 2006) and just re-make the server with yet new kit. The stuff from the Desktop:
- asus a7n8x-deluxe
- 1gb kingston ddr something
- Athlonxp-2800
- meh, that’s pretty much it. Some other bits that made it snappy 3ish years ago.
Shopping list needed:
So, got all the stuff, spent a cpl of DAYS de-installing desktop and server bits, culling desktop bits into server bits, adding the 2x750gb drives and moving the old mp3 120gb drive to replace the dead 120gb drive.
End result:
SME server 7.2 (wowsers!) running on 2x750gb RAID-1 array (the hassle it was to get the motherboard’s built-in raid firmware upgraded to recognise the big drives. Oy.) with a resurrected 4x120gb RAID-5 array (because why not?) hooked up to a gigabit switch.
No desktop machine. The poor thing is just sitting there, eviscerated.
What’s next?
- Install the gigabit card
- eventually, get myself a replacement desktop… I guess… tho recent developments at nvidia are troubling