DGC's Random Mutterings

Home
Archives
Control Panel
DChampagne.com (yeah, it's pretty basic)
My Resume
My Full Background
Blogs worth following: Paul Madsen's ConnectID

Conor's Web Log of Esoterica

Planet Identity
Joel On Software
Mobile Open Source

Note: This blog is hosted on a server in my basement. Greymatter Forums

February 2007
SMTWTFS
    123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728   

Valid XHTML 1.0!

Powered By Greymatter

Monday, February 19th

Server Rebuild


Finally, the server is back up and running....

I originally had a Windows 2000 Server system as the server. It's disks were pretty full (and very fragmented), and I wanted a more convenient Linux system available, so I was rebuilding an obsolete system as a Fedora 6 system, with a 250Gb disk. I also had gotten tired of the Comcast cable system having spotty availability (working from home, being offline for a couple of hours in the afternoon is a major pain), so I took advantage of a DSL offer, and wanted to setup a Linux box as a router to automatically switch between cable modem or DSL when there were problems.

Well, I had Fedora running, but not much else, when we had a nice ice storm.... The power decided to flicker on and off for a couple of minutes, including several periods of the lights being really dim. The only UPS I have is a small one, and it turned out that the Win2K server wasn't plugged into it - just the routers and cable modem were.

Well, of course, the old server refused to boot back up. After quite a bit of swapping disks to the Linux system and backing everything up, it turned out that one of the disks was fried. It ran, but accessing more than half the disk started getting the dreaded clicking of being reset, and general really bad behavior. Running the manufacturer utilities on it just told me to return it, giving me a nice code to generate an RMA from (unfortunately, it was well out of warranty). Trying to check it in Linux didn't work worth beans - no errors or bad blocks, but it was constantly resetting itself and retrying, and I guess eventually working (or remapping a bad block, but then more failing with every test).

Just for the heck of it, before running off a backup, I ran a memtest on the old system, and that was fried as well, about the top third of memory having periodic stuck bits.

So anyway, that system is junk, and everything was moved over to the Linux system. Of course, that requires installing lots of extra packages, Perl bundles, switching cgi scripts from Dos format to Unix format, fixing up embedded dos paths (f:/apache doesn't work well compared to /usr/bin/perl).

Anyway, the internal file system server (Samba) has been running fine, and now the web server is finally mostly back up. Some nuisance stuff to debug still, but anyway....
dgc03052 on 02.19.07 @ 11:35 PM EST [link] [No Comments]