Most of the bits are there: a case (another Cooler Master mesh-front mid tower), power supply (Thermaltake 430W, way overkill and quiet), motherboard (a cheapie that'd been lying around since a hardware shuffle a couple of years back, but it does have a pair of SATA300 ports and gigabit Ethernet), CPU (bargain-basement Core 2 Duo, likewise from a couple of years back), 2 GB of RAM (Crucial), a 1.5 TB hard drive (WD Caviar Green, on sale at Micro Center), a second Ethernet card (just 10/100, an $8 special), and the cheapest video card I could find (a $40 fanless PCI-E 1.0 critter with an Nvidia chipset, Fry's returned special marked down to $24).
Actually, that's the fourth video card that's been in the system. The first was similar but slightly up-spec, and was lying around for some reason, but I completely failed to get VGA video out of it (and didn't try hooking up the DVI, since hooking up another DVI source to my main monitor would be a pain). The second was an ancient PCI card with an S3 chipset; the Debian installer (graphical or text) set it to some mode my monitor didn't like, and the Ubuntu (10.10, Meretricious Manatee or whatever) installer ran out of video memory a third of the way down the screen. The third was a slightly less ancient S3 Virge PCI card, which actually worked fine, but as long as I'm mucking about with Linux installations, I wanted to see how the desktop stuff is coming along, since I'll probably want to update my workstation eventually.
Note the lack of an optical drive. The current server has a DVD burner that was used, once, to read the FreeBSD install CD. Since that time, it's been drawing power and accumulating dust. So, since modern-ish BIOSes support booting from external drives, I'm using a USB DVD drive as the boot device for installation.
First thing to install: shiny new Debian 6.0 ("Squeeze"), AMD64 flavor. The installation process would, I think, have gone smoothly if I'd had the DVD drive's supplemental power cable plugged in. (As it was, the installer would occasionally decide that the drive no longer existed - perhaps because it didn't - and ask for its DVD back. As a result of this, I started with a rather minimal install, with no desktop stuff.)
Looking at the partition table Squeeze created automagically, the first partition is tiny and unused. Hmmm... could it be that the installer recognized my Advanced Format drive and aligned the partitions appropriately, all by itself? Good.
Now, usually the first additional package I install is kpackage, which I then use to select everything else. No kpackage? Argh. Do some looking around: what's the alternative? Oh, synaptic. Doesn't that suck? Try it anyway (over ssh from the workstation, so there's an X server available and also so I can do other stuff while packages are installing). Hey, it's gotten good! Must have taken lessons from the old kpackage.
Install lots of stuff, much having nothing whatsoever to do with the eventual server function (which will call for a fresh install, with manual partitioning). This goes smoothly, once I figure out about getting enough power to the DVD drive.
Try to run kdm. No soap; some complaint about (dang, I misplaced the error message) something that's supposed to be replaced by Desktop Base. Install desktop-base and try again. Same thing. Eh? OK, so try "/etc/init.d/kdm start" instead. Success!
So, how goes the KDE4 suck race with Apple and Microsoft? Actually... not so bad. A little fiddling reveals that one can get back to something like the classic appearance, and right-clicking on the K-start button gets the option of returning to the old menu format. A little "back to the good old days" configuration and a little getting used to the new stuff, and I'll probably come to like it.
On a reboot: it comes up fast. I didn't time it, but the whole power-on to sign-in screen to KDE ready to use sequence seemed much faster than I'm used to... though a distressing amount of the time came after the KDE splash screen disappeared and before the taskbar was fully populated and the menu was ready to respond.
Oh, and X configuration? Forget it. As in, It Just Worked. Came right up with the right server for the card, and the right resolution for the monitor.
On the server front, I notice Apache has sprouted a new(ish) MPM option: mpm-itk. This brings back the ISP-friendly capability that Apache 1.3 used to have, of making each virtual host run under the owner's user ID. I anticipate using this to handle, for example, multiple instances of a web-based bug-tracking system, keeping the one for AGROS entirely separate from client-related ones (and with no need to store database passwords at all, if I'm remembering PostgreSQL's authentication options correctly).
Anyway, there's a bit more tinkering to be done, and I need to stuff one more Ethernet card in the box before declaring the hardware complete and buttoning it up. And, maybe, a second high-capacity hard drive for internal backups. Then a huge external hard drive, and that trio of probably 1 TB portable drives, with one connected to collect data, one in reserve, and one in the safe-deposit box (which I just got yesterday, and haven't put anything in yet, but it is big enough for a portable hard drive plus the other stuff that really ought to be kept in an official Safe Place).
And then there's final server software configuration to be done before I make the switch. My firewall rules will need translating from ipfw to iptables, my BIND configuration (and that pesky dynamic stuff) will need bringing over, and DHCP, Exim, and Apache configs will all need some massaging.
And I need to make sure the NFS and Samba exports are all set up so the rest of the machines will be happy....
Then there'll be Migration Day, with services shut down, data getting copied over (including all the data from Subversion, and PostgreSQL, and all those other things), and trying to get the new server on line. That sounds like a first-Sunday-in-March sort of project.
Anyway: looks like I'll probably be sticking with Squeeze for the server, which is after all meant to be Stable for several years. During playing-around time, though, I guess I'll install Manatee and see how that goes; I may end up using that on the workstation (and if I use it on the workstation, I'll probably put it on the laptops too).
Oh, yes: a Linux annoyance resurfaces as I contemplate server / bastion host use. It's like the eternal problem with USB. How do you keep the network cards straight? On FreeBSD, I used three different network cards with three different chips, and got interfaces called rl0, dc0, and vge0, named based on which driver was involved. On Linux, they'll just be eth0, eth1, and eth2, regardless. I suppose I could write my own init script that identified the interfaces by MAC address and initialized them and set up the firewall rules and DHCP configuration accordingly... or I can determine which is which by trial and error, label them, and hope no future update decides to number them differently.
Or I can test my Google-fu and see if someone's come up with a solution for ensuring that the interface names remain pegged to the correct hardware. (Hm. Looks like, if they use different drivers, I can use 'alias' in the module configuration to define which is which. So, I just need to ensure that the third card doesn't use the same driver as either of the first two, and muck about with device aliases.)
Oh, here we go. The solution I need... In the Futuuuure!
Update: second huge internal hard drive it is. I was thinking Seagate (on the theory that it and the WD primary drive probably won't fail at the same time). Found a 2 TB Barracuda LP on sale. Lotsa space! Actually, I'm thinking it gets used for a combination of critical-data backups and general storage of big, non-critical files.
Still need a big USB drive, and that trio of slightly less big mini drives that'll fit in the safe-deposit box. Seems to be a fair selection of both on offer.
I have no intention of trying to back this stuff up on old-school media, like 1600 BPI 9-track tape or 5 MB removable packs.
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