Howard Young

I’ve been burning in the system for over 2 month now and I’m starting to gain confidence that the Dell GX280, or \\PLMS2 is working ok.  The GX280′s were recycled computers which we bought for $50 without the hard drive.  So all you had to do was go out and install a new SATA drive, install the OS a few apps and your all set.

For some reason, the Western Digital 500GB drive was having problems and I was ready to send the drive back to the manufacture for a replacement.  But I decided to replace the cable to see if that was the problem.  Sure enough, that was the problem.

I finally broke down and built another Linux box to replace PLMS1(Pacific Landmark Server 1) which died a graceful death a few months ago.

Initially I recovered the data from the server and installed it on Ubuntu 7.10 desktop running as a virtual machine on top of my XP desktop.

But I’ve been a lucky recipient of a quite a few Dell GX280s which are more than powerful enough to run LAMP as a test bed; SAMBA and a few other applications to keep the infrastructure up and running. These puppies have a small footprint so I have two backup systems sitting around just in case.

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 Server was a breeze except that I thought it would at least install a basic desktop for management. But that wasn’t too difficult to install.  (Just apt-get install ubuntu-desktop.)  Everything else should be easy to install and configure.

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I managed to kill my Windows 2003 server the other day. It happened when I was upgrading it to Service Pack #2 and it ran out of disk space and couldn’t revert back to the previous version.

You would think that 1.7G is plenty of space to upgrade, but no….

The server was an old Dell 6300 with 4 Pentium II running at a lighting speed of 450 MHz. When it was purchased about five or six years ago, it was an extremely powerful server. And it still is powerful for driving I/O to the Firmware I’m testing.

Since it’s used for testing, it was no big loss. Just the time to reinstall 2003. I plopped in the Enterprise edition and it wouldn’t boot off the CD. I checked the BIOS and alas no “Boot From CD First” configuration. It can boot off a 3 1/2″ floppy.

So I go about trying to create a bootable floppy with 2003 on it. Usually, the Windows OS CD has a utility to create 2003 boot disks so you can install it initially from a floppy. But not on 2003.

There is a way to create a 2003 boot floppy, install a loader and SCSI driver so that you can read the CD after you boot from floppy. So I went through all the trouble to create the disk, plopped in the CD again and reboot.

This time the Dell sees the CD and starts booting off it. The only different I did this time was put the latches down over the CD ROM. Duh. The CD ROM is mounted vertical in the server instead of horizontal as in the majority of all computers. Doh! What a time killer.

Any way I got the OS reinstalled and I’m back in business.

The only bad thing about I.M. Mortal III, is that Dell provided a mechanical mouse with a ball.  I’ve been using the same optical mouse for about 5 years now with out any problems.

With the old style ball mouse, I would have to take out the ball and clean it every 3 months and then toss it out only to buy a new one after a year.

I splurged and bought a Microsoft Natural Wireless Mouse 6000.  The “Natural” is an ergonomic mouse designed to keep the pressure off your wrist.  It’s taking a little time to get use to the position but if it reduces the pressure on my wrist, it’s worth the price.

I managed to fry my motherboard with a little help from Southern Cal Edison. They’ve been having power outages in Thousand Oaks with the last one causing all my servers to shutdown after the UPS ran out of juice.

ClknGo Server 1 (cngs1) is a Win2k server that automatically shuts down via a signal from the UPS when the power is on battery backup.

Pacific Landmark Server 1 (plms1) is a Linux (Red Hat 9), but doesn’t have driver installed to automatically shutdown … so that means, if I’m at home, I shut it down when the lights go out.

My workstation, I. M. Mortal Jr., also on a UPS, shutdown but when the power came up, the power supply was in a weird mode and smoked the motherboard when I turned the UPS back on. The data on the disk drive was OK and I was able to boot the drive off my old HP (I. M. Mortal) which I recently retired after 7 years of faithful use.

I don’t have the time to put together a new system right now so, I. M. Mortal III is now a Dell Optiplex. Dell did a great job of getting it out to me in 3 business days. Luckily, I’ve been converting everything to run on Microsoft Virtual PC since it’s so convenient — and in the case of a fried system — it’s so easy to get back up and running again.