Rising Above Mediocrity
by Benjamin Geiger

Instead of going through the trouble of finding ludwig’s cause of death, I found a suitable replacement.

The local Computer Renaissance had a pallet of used machines: Dell Optiplex GX110 models, with 500MHz CPUs and 128MB RAM each. The quoted price was $50, but the sales guy on duty sold me one for $25. (I didn’t even ask. Honest.)

Continuing with my theme of lesser-known Disney characters, I named the new server “Archimedes” after the owl in “The Sword in the Stone”.

I had a few surprises while configuring the server. Most notably, the IDE controller uses Cable Select and will not function without it. I had the system drive configured as master, and the controller wouldn’t detect it. I had to turn on Cable Select before it would work. There is no AGP expansion slot, but the integrated video uses AGP. I don’t even use X11 on the system, so a lack of decent video is hardly a detriment. And the case is either an engineering marvel or a overcomplicated piece of junk, depending on how irritated I am at it.

The system came with a PCI Sound Blaster Live! card. I removed the card, as a server doesn’t need a sound card, and intend to put it into my Wintendo.

Debian installation went off without a hitch. Even installing and configuring the additional servers I use was easy, primarily because I managed to save the /etc directory from ludwig. I’ve installed samba, dnsmasq, and cups so far without any hassle whatsoever.

All I can say is that I’m pleased with the results.

I just have no luck with fileservers.

Until a bit over two years ago, I had a machine named “sleight-of-mind”. Then one of the hard drives died. When I replaced the hard drive, the machine rose from the… er… disassembled. I took that opportunity to change naming schemes; that machine became “ludwig” (as in “von Drake”, Donald’s uncle).

A few hours ago, ludwig began giving memory paging errors and became unresponsive to input. When I shut it down hard (being unable to shut it down from the console), it refused to restart, giving no response whatsoever. After I cycled the power supply cutoff switch, the lights and fans came on for approximately two seconds before shutting themselves off.

I took the PSU from my Wintendo, baloo, and put it into ludwig. No response, so I know it’s not the PSU that failed.

I don’t know what the failure is, at this point. It could be the motherboard or it could be the CPU. I do know that the machine is ancient (it had a 350MHz K6-2), and any replacement could be equally ancient; I don’t need a quad Xeon to serve up files and run pppd. Now to find a replacement that I can actually afford…

In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t written here since early November. Mostly, that’s just because I didn’t really have anything significant to say. I typically try to wait until I have something substantive to write before I put it here in order to avoid falling into the “what I had for lunch” blogging trap.

Besides, I do more writing over at the User Friendly message board. I’ll try to put more emphasis on my writings here.