Sunday, March 30, 2014

Server Surgery Complete

Now that I completed my taxes last weekend, finalizing the server surgery I started around Christmas was next on the list.

Chef II, our trusty home server for the last 7 years, has grown tired. The 500G RAID array is bursting at the seams and the motherboard doesn't have built in SATA, so adding more disk capacity with modern drives was not possible. It was time for an update.

Since eldest daughter is in Germany, Babybaer, her former desktop computer, formerly used by dearest wife, was looking for a new job. I picked up a pair of 3TB Western Digital NAS drives. They are 5400rpm, not exactly super-fast. Supposedly they should last longer in a 24/7 environment. I'm just hoping they are better than some of Seagate's 2TB drives. The new drives have been spinning in Babybaer for the last 6 weeks with no issues. We'll see.

After setting up the hardware, OS, Apache, NFS, etc. as well as synchronizing data over the last few weeks, today I cut over from Chef to Babybaer. I took the opportunity to upgrade pretty much the whole software stack that serves www.lostentry.org.

Recreating the Nagios monitoring configuration took a significant amount of time. I still don't like how convoluted the configuration files are. The console looks pretty, though.

I might enable the rrdtool integration and get some pretty graphs, too. Not that I don't get enough things to monitor at work ...

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