What you don’t want, first thing in the morning, is to find that Detritus, our Linux development server, doesn’t want to talk. First thing, it isn’t *such* a problem – all I want from it is a Squid (easily turned off) and my Ameol messagebase (which I can live without, if it’s not for too long). I couldn’t get it to slogin, or ping, but I decided to wait until perlmonger surfaced.
In a bleary fashion, we discovered that one of the processor fans had died, and fried a proc. However, in an astonishing coincence, Detritus was due for an upgrade in the next few days – perlmonger had built his new machine made from recycled parts from geoffcampbell, and his old workstation was going to be turned into the new Detritus, so work of a moment to pull the two machines apart, and transfer the drives.
You’d think.
I don’t think I can be arsed to relate the rest, but we were left with two dead power supplies, (probably) two dead (and admittedly old) mobos, and no dev server. And we have no bloody idea why …
A quick call to Novatech elicited that yes, they did have a dual core Intel in stock, with a decent case, 2Gb of RAM, and a 500Gb hard drive. So we hurtled down to Portishead and bought it, with a matching 500Gb drive so we can raid it.
So we got it home, and took it to bits, and phoned their tech support to find out how the fsck you added drives. And then found that they hadn’t given us the appropriate screws [scream]. So I did another 18 mile round trip to pick some up, and then they were the wrong bloody ones.
Still, after a bit of Irish Screwdrivering, one is in, and it’s booting, but it won’t, as I type, talk to the LAN.
Still, with no file server, I took the opportunity to clear the study, and it looks really quite nice and tidy now, at least at my end. I also went through every single CD on the shelves, and threw most of them away. *And* there’s room for 24″ iMac, and clearance for its DVD drive. Shame I’ve just spent the budget on a new Linux box, really …
It came with a BFO graphics card, mind – an NVDIA 8600 GTS PCIE 256mb DDR TV out 2 x DVI. Not a great deal of use in a Linux box with no GUI, so I’ll be putting that on eBay. And I’ve got an old iMac onnastick to sell too, which is restoring to factory defaults as I type.
Tomorrow – the tip, I think, with a variety of dead computer carcasses and a load of bits.