Inserting

The BIOS made some strange things when we inserted the disks. Sometimes it displayed both of them, sometimes only one or none, and sometimes – what was really strange – it displayed the size of 2431MB on one of the two disks. So we tried a lot of things (like switching the two disks, using only one disk, using a 3ware hardware RAID controller, connecting the two disks to another computer, …) but they were not willing to work. It was really getting a pain in our necks.

Firmware upgrades

Fortunately we know a person with great (unix/linux) wisdom and lore at our department. He told us that Western Digital Drives sometimes create problems where there shouldn’t be any. And that the 3ware RAID controller has problems with those drives. We should seek newer firmwares for both the mainboard BIOS and the raid controller BIOS. But we found out that the firmware was already up-to-date. So we were kind of perplex.

What helped

After endless hours of testing, installing, mirroring and copying we thought it would be a good idea to put a third drive in there. This drive was meant to load the boot loader and boot the operating system from the other two disks. So Christian put a third disk in there. And suddenly the server was able to boot from the first of the two WD drives! Strange thing, isn’t it? We figured out that the master jumpered WD drives were not able to work properly when they had no slaves connected to the same IDE cable. How would anyone know that?

Our server now runs perfectly again, thanks to Christian who tried booting when there was no hope left. And we now have a software RAID with mirrored disks that should speed up displaying the sites hosted. Thanks to all people who are hosting their sites on our system for their patience. I’d like to give you a list of those hosted sites:

• Christian
• Rene
• Lea
• Gerd
• Diablo

Setting up the beast

I think it was last week when Ubuntu 5.10 “The Breezy Badger” was released. Good enough to change. But we had to set up Linux from the beginning, no upgrading since the new computer was configured to be a desktop system, not a server. So installing breezy had to be done.

After the installation process was completed we discovered something strange. The installation disk was labeled “Ubuntu install disk”. But neither Christian nor I thought about it: maybe, just maybe, there’s still the old version on it. Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary. Damn it. Well, ok, at least we could apt-get dist-upgrade it with the new sources.list. But this is time consuming, I tell you.

Configuring

Christian did all the configuration and restoring needed to recreate our old system. He really did a good job, and the machine did a good job too, it is much faster than our old server. A lot of things had to be done: restoring home directories, reinstalling packages, setting up mail, web, mysql… We had a weekly backup and a daily incremental backup, so this was not too frustrating. But then it happened.

The Crash

You wouldn’t believe it. The beast crashed again. My all-so-good 60GB drive started with read errors, write errors and then refused to get mounted. When Christian restarted even the servers BIOS couldn’t find the drive! This is crazy, you know? Two harddisks going mad in three days.

At least I could find another hard drive at home. This is just a 15GB drive – I hope it lasts longer than the other one. Until we get new ones. I really hope it does.

Updates

We now use the new Ubuntu release 5.10 which is called “The Breezy Badger”. This release includes PHP5. There’s nothing wrong with PHP5 except my fotoalbum wordpress plugin doesn’t work with it anymore. The DOM XML extension was replaced with the DOM extension in PHP5. And this is bad because my fotoalbum plugin uses the DOM XML extension.

I rewrote it today for PHP5, so have a look. A lot of ISPs still use PHP4, so try out the fotoalbum wordpress plugin PHP4 version first. If you’re having trouble using it (ie. your site doesn’t load content and loads again when you deactivate my plugin) then your ISP has PHP5 running and you’ll have to use the fotoalbum wordpress plugin PHP5 version. Either way have fun with it!

Use the fotoalbum wordpress plugin page for more information on it.