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About this upgrade
Finally I have proper server hardware. It's a Dual Opteron with 8GB of ECC RAM and about 1.2TB of RAID1 / RAID1+0 storage on an Chenbro SR107 case.
It is true if I say that this has been an ongoing slow investment that started over four years ago.
After I got that Chenbro SR107 shipped over to this side of the channel, I decided to invest in storage again - since 2004 - and I bought two new Seagate 1TB SATA-II drives. Also I got rid of the older 80GB IDE drives (not loosing a lot, only 6.25% of the potential 2560GB of raw storage)
So after a bit of sweat (true, the bloody thing weights over 25Kg) I put the thing together and it didn't explode when I started it (already a victory!).
Again, it lives!
Just a couple of notes regarding the first switch-on event. This wasn't done with the setup I'm reporting here. Instead I took the 2 SATA 200GB disks, the 2 80GB ATA disks the the 40GB ATA disk and plugged them all half-randomly across two PCI controller cards.
- BIOS setup: No big deals here. I was surprised, however, that the PCI controller BIOSes boot before the motherboard BIOS setup comes up. Consequently, the main BIOS already knows about disks plugged into non-integrated controller cards. It happened on my two controllers: Promise SATA150 TX4 and Promise E-ATA 20069??. So the board knows about the disks and is able to select which one is to boot the system from. So I just selected one of the disks with GRUB and got on with it.
- GRUB: It just did its magic. I didn't change a single configuration line and it booted fine from the active partition (thank you Microsoft for the simple and featureless but very well supported multi-partition layout), called in a kernel file from a known partition (same old) and started booting it. Sweet!
- MD devices: All this server's storage is kept mirrored at its lowest level via the kernel's md driver. What's so cool is that the /etc/mdadm.conf file referenced md arrays by their UUID references (written on the disks' superblocks). So without changing a single configuration line, all md volumes came up exactly as before, regardless of being in totally different controllers (for which I had conveniently left the driver on the kernel). Note that most if not all device names *had* changed (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc.). How cool is that?
- LVM Volumes: After the md driver sorted all the volumes correctly, LVM didn't have any issues in assembling its own volumes as well. So it did!
- Booting process: 100% successful at first attempt, although the following had changed since the last boot:
- motherboard, cpus, memory
- disk controllers
- boot disk
- disk references and order
Brilliant stuff. After that I slowly (and with about two reboots) added the two new 1TB disks, removed the 40GB and 2 80GB disks and replaced the system's storage pool. Later I also reinstalled the whole operating system, but in the Linux way - I setup a new root filesystem, installed a bare amd64 stage2 filesystem, updated it, put in place all my services and configs and rebooted - *once* (a little tweaking was required after boot like setting the timezone and such stuff that I always forget).
And the result is (among other things) this very page you've been reading.
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Detailed specs
| Case
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Chenbro SR107
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| Power Supply
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Hyper Type M-630W
Silent, powerful enough (600W+) and active switching power supply.
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| Motherboard
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Tyan Thuner K8S Pro (S2882)
- AMD 8111 chipset
- Two socket 940 CPU slots.
- Two banks of four RAM slots each. Takes DDR400 ECC memory up to 16GB
- Integrated SCSI controller Adapter AIC-7902W - two connectors
- Integrated IDE controller XPTO - two connectors
- Integrated SATA controller Silicon Image 3114 - four ports
- Integrated graphics controller
- Integrated 10/100 ethernet controller Intel/Pro100
- 2x Integrated Gigabit ethernet controllers Broadcom BCM5703
- Integrated Serial, Parallel and USB controllers
|
| CPU
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2x AMD Opteron 248 CPUs @ 2.2GHz
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| Memory
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8x 1024 MB Registered DDR SDRAM
Total of 8GB of RAM
|
| Storage controllers
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- Adaptec AIC-7902W Ultra-320 SCSI (internal)
- Promise SATA-150 TX4 four port SATA PCI
- Silicon Image 3114 four port SATA (internal)
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| Storage
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- 2x 1TB Seagate SATA-II
- 2x 200GB Maxtor SATA
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| Network
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- Intel Pro/100 Ethernet controller (internal)
- 2x Broadcom BCM5703 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet (internal)
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| Hardware monitoring
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- Winbond W83627HF Super I/O ASIC
- Analog devices ADM1027 Hardware Monitoring IC
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