Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen: Part Deux
On January 5, I was having breakfast with J at Mike and Rhonda’s when my cell phone interrupted my casual coffee enjoyment. It was the office. The workstations were all off line. To me it sounded like a network issue. I stepped outside to finish my call, people talking on their cell phones in restaurants is one of my pet peeves (closely followed by people on their cell phone in any public place). To me it sounded like a network issue. Step by step each suggestion failed in turn. I resigned myself to cutting breakfast short and heading into the office before the paying job.
Once at the office I went through the steps that I was assured had already been taken. Power cycle the network switches, the server and then workstations. Nothing. Each phase that should have – could have – worked didn’t. I tailed the logs, watched as the workstations/clients booted up and nothing made sense. Then the screen went dark and the BIOS screen appeared. The server had just spontaneously rebooted; never a good sign. Nothing seemed to work and the office was shut down for the day. I went to my full time job for the remainder of the day.
After getting out of work at 7:00pm, I headed back to the tax office and again to read through the logs to see if there was anything that I missed. Workstations still would not PXE boot. The server spontaneously rebooted on me a couple more times and I resigned myself to the fact that the server at somewhere around 7 years old had reached the end of its life. The hard drives were reporting (using SMART) that they were aging, occasionally showing sectors not available. I knew at some point the server would need to be migrated, but I wasn’t ready. I really did hope to get another tax season out of that machine – it was not to be.
On January 6, I unstacked the stash in the corner. Imagine a tower of tower computers placed next to the wall width-wise and two lengths left to right. Imagine that tower at two to three high. Yep the bane of every geek’s non-geek wife (or non-geek husband as the case ma be). The overt hoarding of old computers just waiting for the day when they can be salvaged and recombined into a working machine. These machines are only awaiting the day when their geek overlord, master of their existence, has the chance to evaluate and resurrect them. I unpiled that stack looking for a gem that I knew was there – the beige beast.
The beige beast is pretty impressive. It houses the IntelĀ® Server Board SE7501BR2, has dual hot swap power supplies, 5 hot swap fans with internal wind tunnels (firing this puppy up gave me wind chill) 5 scsi hard drives (well, 5 possible. Only one actually was installed a comparatively small 18g Ultra 320 drive), intrusion detection, dual Xeon 2.4ghz chips. Now this was a hand me down (thanks Steve) so there are no complaints. Some of the hardware is absolutely impressive – dual Xeons in a box that was decommissioned sometime around 2007 and ran Windows 2000 Server. That box cost a pretty penny when it was originally deployed. Today you could grab the board (used) on ebay for less than $20.00. Of course the case is not included at that price.
Wednesday night I began my installation journey. I burned the K12LTSP v5EL dvd. I let the drive select the speed and it warned there might be an underburn
. Naturally I stuck it in the drive and booted – what could go wrong? It did not see the disk. It did not boot. That’s what could go wrong. I grabbed another blank dvd and set the drive speed to 5x. No warnings. Excellent. I swapped the dvds in the drive and… same thing. Then it dawned on me. The drive in the machine was CDROM. I pulled a dvd drive that I have on the shelf, powered the server off, and temporarily installed the dvd drive. I powered up the server and it still choked. (more…)



