FedEx left me a nice box with a Coolmaster HSF and my new ECS board. Originally it was going to be installed in my low end gaming box, but since the Dell mainboard has to go, I stuck it in my workstation instead. My old ECS K7S5A is going into the file server, tonight. Now I’m running an ECS L7S7A2, which is a strange string of alphanumerics that’s harder to remember than K7S5A is. It’s a marginal upgrade over the K7S5A, but I wasn’t really looking for a high end board anyway. It does handle DDR333 and CPUs up to 333FSB. My Athlon XP 1700+ is only a 266FSB CPU though. I should post a review or something. The board itself is mostly uninspiring and equally inexpensive. I got what I paid for.
02.27.04
In November I installed Solaris 8 on a few old Ultra 10s. I decided on the Core install only. This gives you little in the way of basic applications. With the help of SunFreeware and my Solaris 8 Software CDs, I managed to recover to a much more functional state.
Read the rest of “Solaris 8 for Sparc, base install recovery” »
02.26.04
Over the course of recovering my file server, I needed to setup a RAID 0 array real quick, but had no hardware ATA RAID controllers available. Fortunately, Linux has an easy solution.
02.25.04
Dell gets a huge thumbs down for shipping proprietary ATX PSUs with the _standard_ ATX connector, but different wiring.
You did write down the backup superblocks you were given by ext3 when you created your new filesystem, right?
Read the rest of “ext3 filesystem bad superblock recovery” »
The replacement parts I ordered for my file server finally shipped. Apparently they’re being shipped FedEx 2nd Day. Not sure why, but I’ll have them tomorrow it seems. NewEgg rocks, it seems. They’re definitely not the cheapest online vendor, but so far the service has been excellent.
02.24.04
With the 3Ware 6410 toast, I sacrificed one of my 120GB drives. I have the file server back up running with a single 120GB disk. I’ve restored necessary files to get IMAP back online. Nothing quite sucks like not being able to access your mail effectively. I’m going to select a drive that sat opposite of the 120 I just overwrote in the RAID 1+0 array and setup Linux software RAID 0. As long as I pick the correct drive, I should be able to rebuild my RAID 1+0 array completely when I obtain a new card. In the meantime, RAID 0 will grant me the original space allocation, but zero redundancy. Newegg hasn’t shipped my replacement parts yet…
02.22.04
It’s interesting. So many options and choices. I’ve spent much of the day attempting to determine why file server died. There are so many different strategies for regaining functionality and I’ve considered many angles. Each possible approach might have a half dozen side affects that all have to be sized up, weighted, and the solution as a whole scored appropriately.
It seems the situation has not improved.
My post to leaplist earlier this morning:
02.21.04
Apparently my Dell PSU has a loose cable. I was messing around in the case while it was on — don’t say a word — and I had a drive reset. 3Ware reported the drive as no longer in use.
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Gosh, I didn’t realize it would take two hours just to get some semblance of a category list to be displayed on the main page. Cute blog software.
02.20.04
I guess it was going to happen sooner or later. I’m actually posting stuff to a blog. Fortunately I’m hosting all the data, so I need not worry about it disappearing from some random blog Web site. I need to do something about the UI theme though.
I was excited to receive my AOpen H700A last night. It was a huge, heavy, roomy case. The photos online do not quite do it justice. This huge monster has enough room for any modest server.
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