September 18th, 2008 ··· andarius
I passed along that I had gotten a new 1u rack mount server to replace what I was using for my home server. It is an IBM xSeries 330 model which is a bit older but I got it very cheap so it suites me fine. The order of the day when I got it was to install Slackware 12.1 on it and set up services. That was not as easy as I thought it would be.
I really only ran into one hitch. The install failed repeatedly to detect the Adaptec controller the SCSI drives were on. I tried everything I could think of and finaly hit the web looking for answers. Low and behold the answer came in the form of a post on the Gentoo Wiki. Simply passing “acpi=off” to the kernel squared things right away. Off we went on the install.
The system is set up using Linux software raid 1 following the Slackware README_RAID.TXT which can also be found on the install CD. If one can read one can surely set up a Slackware system on soft raid following that how-to. Raid 1 was used to ensure data would not be lost easily on the system. The rest of the install was trivial. After it was complete I set the system up to boot a generic kernel and put the initrd in place. A reboot later I was configuring services.
That was all when I got the machine. Since it only has 18.2 GB SCSI hard drives storage space became an issue almost right away. I added a 500 GB and 1 TB hard drive to my wish list. Low and behold the Birthday Fairy (my mom) came through with a 500 GB HD this week. I promptly placed an eSATA card and external eSATA 3.5 enclosure on order from newegg with over night shipping.
They promptly arrived (gotta love newegg) today and I installed the card and set things up. I had to rebuild the kernel to facilitate easier drive assignment as the defaul generic kernel placed the SATA hard drive first, bumping my raid 1 array over 1. Something I am not comfortable with even if the system picked up the change and drove on like a train.
Now armed with a spiffy new large amount of storage off I go to fill it. Sadly I already have a 120 GB and 160 GB drive near full I wish to transfer to it so I can use the drives for distro testing. Plus that would make the data available to the whole network and keep me from having to swap removable HD caddies to access data.
Perhaps when I get an images section set up I will share some photos.
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