DHI #3: New Server in Permanent Home

Today’s Daily Home Improvement (DHI from now on) was to sew up the new server, and move it from the operating table to the computer rack, its “permanent” place. This was actually more work than it sounds like.

Today’s Daily Home Improvement (DHI from now on) was to sew up the new server, and move it from the operating table to the computer rack, its “permanent” place.

The computer rack is a bunch of shelves where the server, the DSL box, a printer, the phone and some other electronic odds and ends share space with a couple hundred floppies and CDs, and about 40 pounds of unfiled papers. It is a mess. The rack will surely be the subject of many, many DHIs this year.

While I was at it, I removed the old server (a 150MHz Pentium with 80 megs of RAM), replaced the old power cable with a heavy duty cable, moved the CD-ROM drive to a different ATA bus than the hard disk, so the hard disk could run in UDMA100 mode, and tweaked the MIMEDefang startup script to not spew messages in a different format than the rest of the system startup scripts.

The part Rochelle will like the best is that I got a machine out of the living room. Except all I really did was move the new machine out, and the old machine in. But tomorrow the old machine is going to get cannibalized, and I’ll probably put the remains out on the street. Things like that usually disappear in about 35 seconds…