Walking on the Moon

Today I finally finished the latest hardware upgrade to ylum, the server you’re probably reading this on.  I’ve been trying to upgrade it in one form or another for a month or a month and a half.  The original goal was to get a FreeBSD gmirror running for backups (along with filesystem snapshots for file recovery).  That required upgrading my hardware because the old cheap motherboard I was using wouldn’t support the SATA disks I was moving to for mirroring.  Then I had another bad bargain basement experience, and a second motherboard with transient lockup problems.  All in all frustrating.

This weekend I stopped by Fry’s and picked up an Intel motherboard and Intel i5 4-core CPU.  Gotta dig the matching boxes:

Matching Boxes

The only problem is that I didn’t realize that this board has no parallel ATA controller until I was standing there with nowhere to plug my old disk in.  I was able to use the unreliable motherboard to move my data and OS over to a SATA disk, which just booted and ran on the Intel motherboard.  Not an upgrade path I would recommend, but overall things are pretty good.  FreeBSD doesn’t quite see the onboard ethernet yet, but that should be a minor problem, and I have a legacy PCI ethernet in there now that’s doing fine.  The new ylum internals look like this:

Ylum innards

There’s some cleanup and tweaking to do, but 4 2.66 Ghz CPUs make software updates fo much faster.  And mirroring should go into use shortly.

Sorry for any inconvenience, and as always we thank you for your support.