I bought a Synology DS212j to be the replacement of the server. Great machine for very little money, but the transition is not as smooth as I hoped. My mail (domain switchbl8.nl) now runs via the Synology, not via this server anymore. Next is this blog, then the gallery. And the rest is just for fun, so to hell with it 😉
The reboots are still there. Sometimes the system is up for less then a minute, sometimes for more than 2 days. I now disconnected the SATA drives, so that means some stuff (e.g. my gallery) on the server is not available since that resides on the SATA drive. If the system stays up now, it means the extra SATA controller is broken. I hope so, since that’s an easy and cheap replacement.
Keeping my fingers crossed, but I replaced the SCSI controller (Tekram) in the server by one I had in my old-stuff-stash, an Adaptec 2940W. Yep, old. I had to enable “Load BIOS” on the card, but after that the system booted like I never changed a thing. For now the system seems stable, it’s running Ubuntu’s daily.find now. Heavy disk access would previously reboot the system, but so far so good.
On a side note, my desktop PC no longer runs Linux (OpenSuSE). I’ve had it with it. There’s always something that doesn’t work. Or that keeps crashing. Or that suddenly stops working until a reboot. Sound support sucks. After every kernel update I had to do a manual install of the NVidia drivers to get X running. Always waiting for the X64 versions, since the Linux community still thinks we all run 32-bit computers (same on Windows, but at least that let’s me run 32-bit programs without problems).
I bought a new videocard (a Sapphire HD7970 to be exact), bought an SSD (OCZ Vertex4 128GB) and switched to Windows 7. Everything works. Period. And I can now use Adobe software, so I bought Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to finally being able to organize my pictures (lastest count: over 26000) the way I like it (F-spot and Picasa are nice, but not more than that).
Main reason for the videocard was gaming of course. Racing in the first place, FPS as a close second. Bought Deus Ex Human Revolution (FPS-ish) today, more to follow.
The server reboots are not gone. They are less frequent, but certainly not gone. I suspect it has something to do with the old SCSI disk the root-fs is on, so in the days to come I will try to do a fresh install of a newer Linux on the disk that came from my desktop (500GB SATA, system now runs from 9GB SCSI). And then hope that removing the old noisy disk will solve the problem. Can’t think of what to replace else…
I just replaced the CPU cooler in the server, along with its (broken) mounting bracket. The old one was the stock AMD cooler, on a plastic bracket that came with the motherboard. One of the plastic hooks was broken a long time ago, so the cooler was in place, but only just.
I now installed a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO so hopefully the reboots are gone now. In the BIOS the CPU temperature dropped from previously 57 degrees (C) to now somewhere around 34-35 degrees. Much better.
The server reboots did not stop. Just 20 minutes ago, while checking logs and other possibly strange behaviour, the server just rebooted as I was typing the next “pg /var/log/…..” command. I entered the BIOS, to see if the system itself was healthy. CPU temperature went up from 57 to 61 in a couple of seconds whilst the system was doing nothing.
AHA!
I unplugged the system, opened the case, and voila………DUST!
With the vacuum cleaner I sucked out the DUST as gently (lowest power) but as thorough as possible, so hopefully things go better from now on.
My new boss called me today, saying he has a job for me. Start: a.s.a.p., but only when I have my own hardware. So he “ordered” me to buy a laptop. One could get worse instructions from upperhand. So I bought a HP Pavilion dv7-3030ed. It’s not the Elitebook I got from my current employer, but the Pavilion is about 1000 euros cheaper.
It’s a great machine, with Win7 x64 on it, very nice wide 17″ LED-screen, 4 GByte of memory and a 640500GByte harddisk. Notefully, the keyboard is better than on the Elitebook, the mousepad is not. Definitely not. So I’ll buy a lasermouse to go with the laptop.
I forgot to connect the power to the DVD-drive in the server, so later this week I’ll have to open it again.
Apart from that, I think the server is indeed a lot more responsive. Let me know what your experience is.
Update: well, I had to do it just a minute after posting, since the SATA drive stopped responding. Seems like the motherboard SATA works a bit different than the Promise SATA controller