Upgrade day!

So, the poor old media server today finally got disassembled. After many years of service a new 4TB disk arrived today which prompted the gutting and rebuilding of the old computer…

The old machine was pretty rammed, two of the four disks wedged in the base of the case and the mainboard itself was using most of the space of the case and sported the things that I haven’t used for a very long time, like serial ports, parallel ports and floppy disk drive connectors… Not that they’re a bad thing, they very definitely can be useful, but on a server that lives in a cupboard, well, they’re less useful than they might be*.

The case itself is also a dated-sign-of-the-times beast, with firewire conveniently accessible (if only I actually had a firewire port on the new board… or the old board…) and space for ranks and ranks of PCI (or ISA bus) cards for things that these days just come on the motherboard.

So for clarity, and so those of you who care will follow, the media server contained four drives. The OS resides on a 1TB drive. The music (and some random bits of video) on a 2TB drive. And the majority of the video is irritatingly spread across 2 other 2TB drives with an arbritrary middle-of-the-alphabet filename based division because I have just over 2TB of data.

Anyhow, my original plan was to connect up the new 4TB drive, copy the stuff across from two of the (three) 2TB drives (the video ones, merging them. Happiness). Then I’d whip out the 1TB drive that current hosts the OS and put a shiny clean install on one of the now free 2TB drives and woot, all would be shiny and well (and there’d be an empty 2TB drive spare). There was, however, a small (tiny) kink in that plan. The old board didn’t have have any more SATA ports. Then I considered playing swap the drives… Y’know, whip out a 2TB drive and swap in the 4TB. The only problem with that is…well, it’d take longer, and the main problem. I’m very, very, lazy.

Then I decided, fuck it, I’ll just chuck in the new 4TB drive, the new hardware, and see if I can run the upgrade process. If I can great, if not it’ll probably work well enough for me to at least copy the stuff across and I can then yank the 1TB drive afterwards and do the fresh install I was pondering.

Yes, I am aware that I am very, very lazy.

I am a bad sysadmin, I know.

Shush.

I had the usual entertaining time transferring the connectors across (it’s so long since I’ve built a PC I’d forgotten about things like that)… but I seem to have got it so that all the polarities are the right way around. At least it’s not like the machine I built with James back in the day, the i386 we stripped and turned into a 486, I think, which was all individual wires. They even label the connectors on the board now. How nice :)

And after a bit of an ‘engage-brain’ moment realised that the thing does, actually, have three ‘proper’ bays for hard disks (one is the 3.5″ floppy drive bay…doh). And with some careful positioning, a fourth drive can be mounted vertically in the case. If I had some meccano kicking around I could knock up two much, much better mounts. But hey. I’ve now got four drives screwed into the case and the fifth (yes, I’m aware that’s ridiculous) drive is the only one just sat at the bottom. Which is a lot more manageable than the two drives that were sat at the bottom.

It’s now sat attempting to upgrade the system which is, of course, taking a while. It’d probably have taken less long but it’s sat upstairs connected via the old wireless 11Mbps adaptor instead of downstairs where it’s (in)directly plugged into the router. Also, the drive that is being upgraded is the 1TB drive that’s quite definitely the oldest.

If you hear an anguished wail in a few hours that’ll be me discovering that it’s not worked.

* Incidentally I had a look at the other machine** thinking it might have a backplane that was closer to the one I need that I could ‘trim’ to fit, and discovered that it’s got capacitor plague, which is presumably why it died. Also possibly why it was irritatingly unreliable as a camera-monitoring device. I suspect it may be completely dead. Oh, and the backplane was at least as useless as the one that is in the machine I’ve just disassembled.

** And I thought it might have the 3.5″ -> 5.25″ adaptor in it; I’ve know idea where it’s gone…

Failure is a dish best served...err...on rapidly spinning platters?

I failed to check one teensy tiny thing. The old install was still running as 32 bit. Because, well, the processor it ran on, with its single core, was a 32 bit processor.

The new one? 64 bit. Should be running a 64 bit OS.

Also, Ubuntu doesn’t seem to like the upgrade very much. It’s working, but there’s random errors, and various bits seem to have failed.

…so tomorrow I’ll be upgrading the upgrade. Well, nuking the site from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure). On the plus side, it means I can yank the 1Tb drive that’s just sitting there at the bottom of the case.

Review: Covergalls

So last year, whilst I was in the US I picked up some Covergalls. Now I’ve worn (C)overalls for working on the car for years. Years and years. My current set, which consist mostly of a mixture of oil, grease and grit combined with some cheap poly-cotton fabric came second hand from a classic motor show and are emblazoned with ‘European Airspace’ or something like that.

I’ve also got an almost as ill-fitting and similarly grotty, but higher cotton percentage pair that I got in secondary (high) school for my work experience*.

Part of the reason I’ve been loath to pay actual money for work wear is because it fits like shit. I mean, if it fits in the *cough* chest region then it’s flapping around like a tent elsewhere. If it fits elsewhere, then it doesn’t do up. So besides the point that they get covered in shite in my workshop (I’m not the tidiest, nor the cleanest of workers, and classic cars are hardly a feast of non-oilyness), if I’m going to buy something that doesn’t fit…I’ll get something cheap.

Anyhow, fed up of this craptastic situation and with The Electric Minor Project slowly working its way towards actual progress I decided to fork out real money for a decent set of (c)overalls. After much searching I found Covergalls and after some more pondering ended up buying them.

And they’ve languished at the back of the cupboard since. Why? Well, I’ve not actually done anything sufficient on the car, and also I’ve been slightly wanting to christen them on the Minor. But in the end I decided that I’d use them whilst I was changing the battery on the Prius.

Changing the battery on the Prius is a surprisingly involved procedure, involving removing a brake controller, and whilst it wasn’t going to be filthy I’d be outside for a while poking and fishing. So I popped on my shiny new (c)overalls and set to.

I can sum up the experience in one word. Awesome. Maybe two words. Amazing.

They don’t ruck up, they actually fit, they’re comfortable. I can use the loo without shimmying out of them and shedding crap everywhere. At fucking last.

They’re sturdy, and feel like they’ll last, certainly for the level of hardship they’ll have with me.

I have never been quite so excited about (c)overalls, but for my female type friends, I highly recommend them. They are about 50 billion times better than any (c)overalls I’ve ever had before.

Mens, I cannot help you. You’ll just have to live with your sucky (c)overalls.

* Yes, I did my work experience at a Ford garage. It was literally my last choice.