daedalus, my colocated server in Brisbane is getting a bit long in
the tooth. It's an 866Mhz Pentium III, with 256Mb of PC100 RAM, and a couple
of 120Mb IDE hard drives. The hard drives are new to when I reinstalled it
about a year ago, but other than that, nothing's changed since I bought it
in 2001. It's served me extremely well.
I started hosting Mikal's website,
late last year some time, and then I also hosted a temporary UML instance
for the linux.conf.au 2006 guys.
Then the poor old box really started to grind. It also crashed a couple of
weeks ago, and since then, one of the disks has been exhibiting read errors
(they're software RAID-1, but post crash, the one with the read errors came
up clean, and couldn't sync properly with the one that didn't have read
errors).
So I decided it was time to lash out on a new box. With the possibility of
relocating to the US to work, I didn't want to have to deal with a dying box
from the US, so I figured this was a very good time to be upgrading. I
ordered a Dell 1850 in the last days of the financial year. I went a bit
nuts:
- 2 x 3.0Ghz Xeon 2M cache CPUs
- 2 Gb DDR-2 400Mhz RAM
- 2 x 73 Gb SCSI drives
- dual power supplies
Hopefully this will last me the next four years and beyond.
But anyway, onto the Just Works bit...
Tonight I went to install Sarge, and I thought, bugger burning a CD, let's
try a netboot. So I untarred the relevant tarball onto my boot server,
tweaked DHCP slightly, and PXE booted the new server, and it all Just
Worked. I installed an LVM on RAID setup with absolutely no funny business
required. It was awesome. d-i is the business.
