Years ago I had a game machine I named Amarna. It was 133 MHz. Its hard drive died in April 2004.
I have decided to recycle the name for my new house file server.
| Hardware Components | Status under Linux | notes |
|---|---|---|
| video ATI |
unknown | I have not even attempted to start X windows. |
| SATA | working | Go into BIOS and change it from IDE to AHCI mode to activate ports 5 and 6 |
| USB | working | I was able to install from a USB-attached CDROM by using the F12 boot menu. I used a USB keyboard connected to the front panel. |
| audio | unknown | |
| ethernet RTL8111C |
working | Device Drivers/Network Device Support/Ethernet (1000 Mbit)/Realtek 8169 gigabit ethernet support
CONFIG_R8169 |
| firewire | unknown |
This past weekend was Georgia's tax-free holiday, meaning I could buy parts slightly cheaper than usual. I already had 5 SATA hard drives hooked up to my old file server, so I didn't have to buy those.
I loaded the RAM and CPU onto the motherboard before I loaded it into the case. When first I turned it on I got no video signal. After several minutes of fiddling and worrying I realized I had only connected the 24-pin power connector. There was another 8-pin (24V?) that modern motherboards need that I had not connected. I thought those were mostly used by plug-in video cards. Still I wish it could have come up with some kind of video signal saying "plug in the rest of the power, dumbass".
I used an external USB-attached DVD drive to install gentoo. This is awesome. I don't have to buy optical drives for stuff any more.
The default gentoo parameters for mkfs.ext3 are bad, specifically they do not create enough inodes. I created a 4G root filesystem (all of my bulk storage hard drives have a 4G sda3 set aside for this purpose) and ran out of inodes long before I ran out of disk space. mkfs.ext3 -T news seems to have about the right number of inodes/block.
It took me a while to find the right kernel settings for my ethernet card. It turns out the RTL8111C on the motherboard is actually a gigabit ethernet chipset.
|
Problem 1: you can not install the drive without taking off the
back plate of the case. Some cases avoid this problem by having
screw-on rails (one of my Antecs has rails). Some make the drive cage
removable itself.
Problem 2: the RAM interferes with the insertion of the hard drive into the top 3 slots of the internal 3.5" cage. Even though I did not populate the frontmost RAM slots I had to tilt things to slide the hard drive into position. I suspect this problem will bite anyone using a full sized ATX motherboard with this case. Problem 3: the coolermaster boomerang quick-locks for the top two 3.5" slots do not match up with the mounting holes on a 3.5" hard drive. I think I will be able to use normal screws, assuming I can get a hard drive past the RAM chips. |
I took the cage that held the other 4 drives from my old file server and connected them to the new computer. Linux could not see the 5th drive. It turns out the BIOS defaults to IDE mode for the first 4 SATA connectors, but the 5th and 6th on-board connectors are disabled in this mode. I switched it to AHCI mode and that enabled the 5th and 6th drives.
Since the inode problem was preventing me from installing the rest of the packages I wanted, I broke down and created a separate /usr and /var partition. Since I had all 5 drives and could access my LVs I created them with an appropriate block/inode ratio and transferred all the files.
I configured NFS and started telling the rest of the computers in the network where to find the relocated filesystems.
My root filesystem is on a RAID software mirror, although because I created it with a single drive it wasn't very redundant. Now that I have the rest of the drives attached, I added /dev/sdb3 to the RAID and the mirroring was complete in less than a minute. I am used to RAID reconstructions taking hours, but those RAIDs are 300+G, not 4G.
Before I load up the case with hard drives, I needed to install the front fan. My initial attempt was a failure, but that's because I still had the finger guards screwed on. After removing those metal grills I was able to fit it into the space and screw it into place.