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So today's small victory was beating my HP Proliant ML110 - the original model from 2004, with a 3GHz P4 in it - into submission.
It used to run Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server. Not really from my choice...
I got it with an HP UltraSCSI adaptor in it, but no disks, & I don't have enough to populate it.
So, I swapped it with the PCI-X Dell CERC ATA-100 controller out of my Dell PowerEdge 600SC, acquired around the same time. The Dell has 3 IDE controllers on the motherboard anyway, meaning it can boot from a pair of more-than-big-enough-for-Ubuntu-Server 10GB UltraSCSIs and still has enough ports to drive 4 UltraIDE disks and an IDE CDRW drive to boot and install from.
This left me struggling to fit six UltraIDE drives into the Proliant - it's only really meant to take four, but a pair of cheapo 3½"-to-5¼" mounting kits from eBay let me use the two spare removable bays, too. I have six spare 80GB IDE drives and a seventh in case of failure, so this gave me a total of 372GB of RAID5 storage. OK, not a lot by modern standards, but actually, that is a lot of space. I don't game, I don't download a lot of movies or TV, and I don't want more space than I can back up onto one relatively inexpensive external disk.
Snag is, last year, no Linux distro could access a RAID5 on the CERC controller. It's really an ALI MegaRAID i4, bought to drive a mirror pair with Linux, but kernel 2.6.twenty-whatever-was-current-in-2009 couldn't see RAID5s on this controller. Windows could. So, finding an eval copy of W2K3 SBS in the garage, I went with that, and it worked fine.
But as mentioned in an earlier post, unfortunately, it timed-out at the start of Jan and my server stopped working for more than 1h at a time. Microsoft's elegant method for enforcing the evaluation period is to have the server automatically throw a bluey - a BSOD - after an hour of use. Nice.
So I decided to try this copy of Windows 2008 I have. Put an external screen on it, boot Ubuntu 9.10, move all of W2K3SBS into a "previous system" folder (that's what Mac OS X does when you "archive and install", so it seemed appropriate), boot Windows 2008 and install it. It all went swimmingly. It took an hour or 2 to get it running, but it even detected and installed the inbuilt Broadcom NIC for me, which is more than 2K3 could do. (According to a review I found, these damned boxes shipped with W2K3, so it ought to have worked - but it didn't. Had to faff around downloading the driver on another machine and transferring it across with a USB key. Of course, the HP setup disks I got with the machine don't contain anything as mundane as a NIC driver, oh no. Management tools agogo, but no actual, you know, drivers.
( And then the niggling issues started... )
It used to run Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server. Not really from my choice...
I got it with an HP UltraSCSI adaptor in it, but no disks, & I don't have enough to populate it.
So, I swapped it with the PCI-X Dell CERC ATA-100 controller out of my Dell PowerEdge 600SC, acquired around the same time. The Dell has 3 IDE controllers on the motherboard anyway, meaning it can boot from a pair of more-than-big-enough-for-Ubuntu-Server 10GB UltraSCSIs and still has enough ports to drive 4 UltraIDE disks and an IDE CDRW drive to boot and install from.
This left me struggling to fit six UltraIDE drives into the Proliant - it's only really meant to take four, but a pair of cheapo 3½"-to-5¼" mounting kits from eBay let me use the two spare removable bays, too. I have six spare 80GB IDE drives and a seventh in case of failure, so this gave me a total of 372GB of RAID5 storage. OK, not a lot by modern standards, but actually, that is a lot of space. I don't game, I don't download a lot of movies or TV, and I don't want more space than I can back up onto one relatively inexpensive external disk.
Snag is, last year, no Linux distro could access a RAID5 on the CERC controller. It's really an ALI MegaRAID i4, bought to drive a mirror pair with Linux, but kernel 2.6.twenty-whatever-was-current-in-2009 couldn't see RAID5s on this controller. Windows could. So, finding an eval copy of W2K3 SBS in the garage, I went with that, and it worked fine.
But as mentioned in an earlier post, unfortunately, it timed-out at the start of Jan and my server stopped working for more than 1h at a time. Microsoft's elegant method for enforcing the evaluation period is to have the server automatically throw a bluey - a BSOD - after an hour of use. Nice.
So I decided to try this copy of Windows 2008 I have. Put an external screen on it, boot Ubuntu 9.10, move all of W2K3SBS into a "previous system" folder (that's what Mac OS X does when you "archive and install", so it seemed appropriate), boot Windows 2008 and install it. It all went swimmingly. It took an hour or 2 to get it running, but it even detected and installed the inbuilt Broadcom NIC for me, which is more than 2K3 could do. (According to a review I found, these damned boxes shipped with W2K3, so it ought to have worked - but it didn't. Had to faff around downloading the driver on another machine and transferring it across with a USB key. Of course, the HP setup disks I got with the machine don't contain anything as mundane as a NIC driver, oh no. Management tools agogo, but no actual, you know, drivers.
( And then the niggling issues started... )
