Published by Mircea on 09 Jul 2005
Server Upgrade
Today was the day. My brother bought a new computer for him so our old computer got the chance of becoming our server. We have been using successfully for some time an old P3 @ 450MHz. We have an extra 100MHz now 
Big deal some of you might say.
The actual advantages this piece of hardware brings are:
* silent HDD (the HDD in the old computer has a terrible metallic noise)
* bigger HDD (20GB instead of 8.6GB).
* tons of RAM, for what it is going to be - this computer was turned into a PC133 RAM deposit: it currently holds 256+128+64 MB of RAM - I’m not sure what I’m going to use them for
The upgrade process ate half of this day:
* the muscle part took 1h: I had to carry computers around the house, trying to cross wire IDE cables (the 8.6GB HDD is strangely placed in its anciend case and I couldn’t take it out), changing jumpers and so on
* copying Linux from the old HDD took another hour - something might have been wrong about this, it took too long.
* getting Linux to boot took some time - I actually forgot that the “new” server hangs if it’s set to boot from CDROM,C,A, with no CD in the drive - I’ve played a bit with lilo… pretty annoying
* by far the most annoying and time expensive procedure was tweaking a computer which boots perfectly. Fortunately, I was pretty patient. This was the part where: in order to work it needs to be put next to the wires, in order to change it needs to be moved next to the monitor. I’ve moved back and forth a few times only because I forgot to change eth0 < -> eth1 in the DHCP server config and in the firewall script. I didn’t want to change the cables because I had the network cards tagged. Oh.. sure.. I could have chaged the tags - this just crossed my mind - a tad late.
* I’ve also experienced electricity going through my finger, while trying to fit the network wire into the external interface network card - I believe the network jacks (if that’s the way they’re called) are not fitted right to the wire
Anyway, it was an interesting experience. I’ve remembered some of the “joys” of playing with networks.
Everything made me wish I had a barebone computer as a LAN server. Unfortunately, nobody thinks of making a barebone for low-performance computers running Linux. We’ll see about that in the future…