Der Neuer Presidium.org.
The new & improved 1U presidium.org chassis arrived today, so those of you who use it can expect an upgrade somewhere in the next few days.
It’s about time that old beast got replaced. The hardware is presently a seven year old motherboard / CPU combo (AMD Thunderbird 850 MHz, 512 MB PC133 SDRAM) that I bought with saved lunch money when I was in 9th grade, in 2001. Now that increasing numbers of people are starting to use it for ever more serious purposes, that just can’t cut it anymore. I’m amazed the hardware lasted this long.
There is the somewhat hairy issue of migrating the hard drives into the new chassis. The old box has two 400 GB SATA drives with an add-on PCI SATA controller — software RAID-1 array in Linux.
If anyone has any tips or insights about the survivability of software RAID metadata (i.e. kernel/ramdisk recognition of superblocks) across a migration between SATA controllers (the new server has onboard SATA, although I can transplant the old controller card if need be; the chassis has one Riser slot)… please let me know. 
January 10th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
As some of you, this did not go so well due to boot sector complications. I was at the data center until about 6:00 AM working on the box.
The new Presidium is now running. Userspace data and databases are intact, but much of the system configuration residing in /etc had to be blown away. As a result, virtual hosts, accounts, etc. have to be re-established on a tedious, per-case basis. Also, please let me know what domains and/or services you had running, as I myself do not have a mental catalogue of that.
We’ll get through it. Just bear with me.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Thanks for all the hard work you put into getting the new server up and running and also for just making it available to us over the years.
Where there any shady suspects in the data center at that time of the morning? I’d imagine it’d be a like a waffle house in there. “4U opteron scattered, smothered covered!”
take care buddy!
January 14th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
You are very welcome. Presidium always has been, from its beginnings as a low-end Pentium II sitting on my bedroom hanging off my cable modem, a free peer-run service for the common welfare of my friends and family.
Most of the problems I had with this reinstall stemmed from the fact that when I upgraded the hard drives a year and some change ago, I had to get a peripheral PCI SATA controller card. The board is from 2001 - no onboard SATA. This also means - as I discovered when installing - that the BIOS is too old to boot off an offboard SATA adaptor, and no BIOS update was available to make this possible. So, I had to leave in Presidium’s old IDE drive in there just to house the boot sector.
Somehow, this didn’t work when the BIOS changed. Must be different drive offsets or something, I don’t really know. But repeated attempts to rewrite the boot sector - both onto the first drive in the software RAID array and onto the legacy IDE drive - from “rescue” mode consistently failed for reasons I do not quite fathom.
The SATA controller is nearly identical - both SiS, narrow subpart numbers apart model-number wise.
At least Clint was right that RAID metadata / superblocks would survive the move unscathed. Thank goodness.
January 14th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
yeah, call me old school, but i still view sata as the “flying car”: new, but if it breaks, you’re going to fall really quick”. i think of workstation, i think ide. i think of server, i think scsi.
i think it’s literally going to take something along the lines of witnessing a sata drive withstanding the force of a ballistic missle to get that thought out of my head.
oh sweet prejudice…….
On the up side, aside from peering into dmesg to check out the collection of Aweseme that prints out, I hardly even notice it just had a brain transplant. Cheers!
January 14th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Funny, that’s how I view airplanes.