Journal tf23's Journal: So I'm buildin a fileserver 2
I finally got fed up using old hardware. I finally got fed up with old drives dieing at just the right time (been too busy to change the tapes? ah, I'll get it tommorrow, I don't want to fuck with it now).
So I decided I'd rebuild my server box at home. I came upon this conclusion about a year ago, but it's taken me quite some time to save up enough ca$h to be able to buy the parts I wanted.
So I waited. Driver after drive has failed over the past few years, and it'd only continued over the past year, but less so. So I kept pluggin along, swapping drives, hardware, cables, fans, you name it, to keep the file server alive.
Now, for the curious of you out there - this file server was a P1 box originally (see the case) built ~5 years ago. I love it's case. It did have SCSI drives in it, originally, I think 2 4GB's or something. As I've built machines, whether for me, the wife, the kids, parents, etc, the old drives were always thrown into this file server machine. (The many drives in it *makes* it a server, btw).
Which is why I've had to do so much hardware shifting in the box. Stuff just keeps dropping dead.
The motherboard was up'd a few years ago, the thing now has a AMD duron 700 in it w/ I believe 256MB ram (could be 512, I can't remember). It won't knock you down with it's speed, but it's a home file server, c'mon it don't need much more then that.
Anyway, back to the story. I'd been saving, and I finally was able to pickup a real raid card. I had been using el cheapo promise ide100 or ide133 or SIG ide100/133 cards in the box. A few weeks ago I picked up a 3ware 8500-8 8port Serial ATA. Oh for the love of it. I've had it sittin in the box for so long. Wanting to install it, to benchmark it. But I couldn't! I didn't have any drives. I wasn't about to use a bunch of old 20 or 40GB drives on it. What a waste. I wanted new. I wanted huge!!
Well leave it to slashdot to push me over the edge. I read
Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte
and I couldn't take it anymore. I had been keeping a slight eye on drive prices, but they weren't dropping quick enough for me. If I was going to do this right, I wanted 180GB's or larger in there. And I'd need 3 of them.
The article put the bug back in me in a nasty way. I ended up buying not one, but 3 200GB drives last weekend. Oh was I excited. I was finally going to have raid5 at home. No more worries about the drives dieing and losting stuff.
Then I realized I needed cables. The card only came with one. I needed 2 more. I'll eventually need 8.
And adaptors.
The serial ATA cables aren't that expensive. $5-$15 each. But the damned adaptors are big $$ for what you get. I spent all week searching, found them for $26 ea. I crinched. What a rip. Within 2 years I'll see them at the hardware sales for a few bucks each. Got them shipped to me. And waited.
The box came Tuesday. I didn't have time to mess with any of it.
But I wanted to.
So last nite, Wednesday, I got home from work on time (a rarity).
I grabbed my bags of stuff, my screwdrivers, my flashlight, my bucket of screws/jumpers/misc parts, and headed to the dungeon - the basement. (That's where my wife allows me to keep my stuff, right by the patch panel, furnace, sump pump and the water heaters). I found a blanket the kids left down there, threw it down, shutdown the box and dug in. (the cement floor is freezing down there, the cement block on the walls probably doesn't help it).
I froze my nuts off. I have the battle scars on my fingers where the mysterious parts cut me. Once again I've marked another PC with my red DNA.
But I've got the card, and drives, installed.
It's actually very nice. The drives, the cables, even the adaptors *worked*right away.
And the cables for serial ATA... well, let me just say, this is a *long* time coming. They are so nice. So routable. No clutter. No circulation blocking.
It just worked. I couldn't believe it.
So I set the raid up, and let it hunker down to build itself. When I went to bed it was at 70%.
When I got up in the morning, it was done. The shell prompt was there.
I went upstairs and ssh'd into it from my workstation. Downloaded the stuff from 3ware. Installed the module. Setup the FS. Ah the glory of it. All that space!!!
I set the machines upstairs to start copying all sorts of stuff to it, just to see how it'd handle. It was chuggin along, taking everything the 2 upstairs machines could scp over to it.
I was pleased. No, I was very pleased.
So I went to work. Got busy during the day. Lunch came. Went and got subway.
Decided to ssh into the box to see how far the copying got. (I set it up to move enough mp3's and graphics/mpgs to go all day).
Can't. No response. The firewall says no route to the server host.
DAMN IT! It's dead.
So that's where I'm at. Wondering what the heck happened to my baby, and I can't find out 'till tonite when I get home from work....
Re:what?! (Score:2)
It turns out that redhat7.3 is having problems w/ the USB on it's motherboard.
I got home, and the machine was just hung. It had a ton of USB error messages on the screen, all locked up.
I reset it, and went into the bios and disabled USB.
The thing's been stable ever since. I'm copying tons of stuff over too it - been all weekend - no problems what so ever.
I brough home a spare 40x ide cdrom from work, thinking that I could put RH8 on the machine. I tried last nite. Turns out the drive wasn't a spare - it's a dead dud off one of the dell workstations at work. Sigh...
So the RH8 will wait. Technically, I guess there's no reason to bother upp'ing to redhat8, other then it'd be nice to have all the machiens at home running the same distro and version.
Once I get all the files moved off my workstation in the computer room (it's winXP) to the raid, I'll wack the winXP and replace w/ redhat, thereby removing MS software from the house, entirely.