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by Chris Winters.
Original Post: Moved the mail/web server; good rackmount systems?
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Since the PowerBook has passed its two-month test I felt decent about moving my old workstation to be the mail/web server. It's a P3/1000 (vs P3/600) and has U2W SCSI as well (vs. UDMA-100). So everything should be faster -- not that I'm really taxing the machine right now or anything.
The move process was fairly simple:
Wipe out the partitions on the old machine and create new ones, first backing up /etc and /boot just in case. (I backed up all my other work when I moved to the PowerBook.)
Take down the server. Keeping the website up with a maintenance message was trivial -- I told the router to use my PowerBook for all HTTP requests and setup there a simple 'under maintenance' page for people to see no matter what URL they requested. (I should have got a router like this ages ago...)
Physically mount the server's drive into to my workstation
Boot using a Gentoo Live CD, mount all the necessary filesystems (old and new) and copy all the data over from the old IDE drive to the SCSI drives.
chroot to the new root (on SCSI), configure and recompile a new kernel (to include SCSI, different ethernet driver, sound, Matrox-specific stuff)
Ensure that GRUB is installed on the boot loader and that the /boot partition is marked as bootable (paranoia since it was already there from the workstation)
Edit /etc/fstab to point to the new partitions
Reboot. Test a bit to make sure everything is up. Then shut it down and hook it up in its normal location and bring it back up.
Modify the router to point to the server for HTTP requests. It's all good...
My long-term plans for my personal mail/web services, plus OpenInteract services, are to get a decent rackmount server and take advantage of some bandwidth generosity. I've been out of the hardware business for a while (thank goodness) so I'm kind of clueless as to where people get prebuilt rackmount servers.
My needs are pretty simple -- 1U, single or dual P3/Athlon, decent amount of memory (512MB - 1GB), space for two or three drives. SCSI would be nice but that bumps up the price by $500 or so. Anyone have a good experience with a vendor? (I've been looking at Bold Data and their prices seem pretty good and their rep, while a little dated, is also good.)
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