/dev/zero

Ok, maybe that’s a bit premature. and I revived an SGI Crimson today. It’s been sitting in storage waiting for us to clean it and put it back together for some time. Too bad it’s not actually useful for anything. The geek in me wants to keep it, even if it’s just an endtable that hums. But the thing is about 2 cubic feet and weighs pretty darn close to 200 lbs. It’s just too darn big for my room. And it draws 16 amps of power. Would keep my room nice and warm on those cold winter nights.

I’ve been struggling with a new server to replace forge.godmoma.com. The current forge is a desktop PC. Dual PIIIs and a couple of 17 gig hard drives. The new machine, hammer, is a 2U rack mount unit, dual 550Mhz PIIIs, 4 8gig IBM SCSI drives and 1 160gig Western Digital IDE drive. I’ve been trying to get Red Hat 8.0 installed. It would install fine but kept dieing on the first boot. GRUB would lock up at stage 2. I tried FreeBSD to, which worked fine, but I only have a disk for 4.1 which is a little old and doesn’t have any support for software RAID. I tried Red Hat again and told it to install LILO instead of GRUB. LILO worked fine.

[root@hammer andrew]# df -H
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md1 18GB 1.8GB 15GB 11% / < ----- RAID 5, 3 drives, 1 spare
/dev/md0 103MB 16MB 82MB 16% /boot <----- RAID 1, 3 drives, 1 spare
/dev/hda2 156GB 51MB 148GB 1% /home <----- BIG flippin drive!
none 528MB 0 527MB 0% /dev/shm
/dev/cdrom 675MB 676MB 0 100% /mnt/cdrom

Couple more days and I'll be ready to slap this in the rack and start moving data over from forge. Customers should be happy. Everything will be configured much better. Should be easier for them to get at their files.