New Server!

Just crazy. A while back when I had acquired the Dell XPS 710 I was using (that died) there were also a few other machines that fell into my hands. Most of them where old desktop garbage, under 1ghz 256mb ram stuff, eck lol. But there was also a server. A Dell PowerEdge 840. The machine was stripped of all drives and memory but it did have a SCSI card, which I have no use for. I had to borrow some ECC unbuffered memory from a friend to try and get it to work, which I couldn’t. I was able to get it to boot but nothing I did would make the damn thing recognize a hard drive. Even adding a PCI-E SATA card, nothing. I could not bring myself to throw it away however, I have a hard time letting go I guess. Which is a good thing!

After the server died last month I have been trying to figure out where I am getting the cash for a new one or “what else could I do”. I was going to go down the PCDuino road when I decided to try the PowerEdge one more time. I was pretty sure I did not have any ECC ram, but sure as shit when I looked in my Bag-o-Ram there was two 512mb sticks sitting there. WTF, I do not remember those. So I tossed them in and the machine booted up. Quick look through BIOS, yup everything looks OK. Power down, added a hard drive, powered up. #$%&@#$$%&!!!1 It fucking worked. I did have to enable all the hard drive options in BIOS but I would have sworn I would have tried that the last time too. Fuck it, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Moved all the drives, minus two smaller IDE drives (not enough ports/room), and ClearOS booted. Albiet into emergency mode or whatever but hey it booted. I had to issue a command and no I don’t remember what it was, but it was printed out on the screen. “Hey idiot, do this.” And then a reboot once or twice and ta-da Bob’s your uncle. I did have to do a little finaggling with the ethernet card, but since I moved the PCI-E card too it wasn’t that bad. At first ClearOS gave me all new card names (like eth0, eth1 instead of enp3s0. Which I always thought was an odd name). but it renamed them all to the older scheme after a reboot. It basically only took about 20 minutes after I moved all the hardware over to get ClearOS up and running. I am very pleased – for once.