Got home today to find my new BIOS chip had arrived in the mail! Quick before dinner I plugged it into the socket and booted up the server. We have liftoff!
Thanks BIOSMan!
After dinner, as I was playing with the server some more, my family says “Something’s beeping downstairs and we can’t figure out what it is.”
So I go downstairs, and sure enough, something’s beeping. It turns out that I lost a drive on my Openfiler RAID! The odd thing is that it marked the drive as degraded, then failed, then rebuilding. And now it’s rebuilding the array on the drive. But that can’t be good.
The humorous thing is that just today I setup the RAID monitoring utilities so that it would email me drive failures and the like. And sure enough, there are three messages in my mailbox, telling me about the problem.
I was setting up the partitions on another 80GB drive so that I could have a mirrored pair in my main server when I moved to new hardware, but now I may have to use this drive in the Openfiler RAID! Bah. What I’d really like to do is get four new 120GB IDE drives and use them in the Openfiler, but that’s not going to happen unless I get some windfall or something.
On another good news/bad news note, Nate gave me an RG-1000 Wireless Access Point today, free! 802.11b is good enough for me, and he showed me how to upgrade the WEP key from 64 bit to 128 bit too! (You also need the firmware image from here.)
But, alas, he had no power supply for it. I dug around at home, but I don’t really have anything suitable either. It needs 9V DC at 1.1 Amps. I have a 9.7V 500mA supply, or a big 12V supply, and looking at the circuit board, it looks like the first thing the power hits is a 5V regulator, but the regulator doesn’t have any heat sink on it and I think the difference between dropping 9V to 5V and dropping 12V to 5V might just cause a little heat issue.
So tomorrow I’ll ask Nate to dig in his closet a little deeper in the hopes that he can find the right power supply for this beast.
On the totally good news side, I got my new firewall built (but not installed yet.) It’s another Nate freebie special. š
He gave me a dual Pentium Pro motherboard (an Intel PX440FX) with two 200MHz CPUs and 512MB of RAM in a 4RU rack mount case. It’s got one on-board SCSI channel, so I hooked up a pair of old 4GB SCSI drives I had (hope they don’t start failing – knock on wood), tossed in a couple of Intel 100MB NICs and away we go. It’s got one NIC on-board, so I can hang the wireless off on it’s own network (once I get a power supply) and limit it’s access to my internal network, just in case.
I built the rule set using FWBuilder. Man does that rock. I built the rules and they installed slick as a whistle. FWBuilder has all kinds of nice bells and whistles that I’ll need to explore some more, but it sure is a nice GUI for building iptables rule sets. It also supports ipfilter, OpenBSD pf and Cisco PIX and there are some people writing some interesting modules for it.
So this weekend the main server may move to it’s new box, with a new motherboard and a 3RU rack mount case (another Nate freebie special), and the new firewall may get installed. And if Nate or I can locate a power supply, I may have wireless too. We’ll have to see how ambitious I feel after eating all that turkey on Thursday.
And a big THANK YOU to Nate for all the free hardware! (I know he’s reading this, he’s one of my three regular readers. š )
