Server upgrade for Ylum
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.