Tomorrow morning, I go out to the colo box and replace the existing one with my spiffy “new” Yellow Menace. I’ve tested the hell out of this one and it can handle all three domUs and the dom0 all doing dd’s from /dev/zero to the hard disk over and over again, which will be a nice change from the existing one freezing up throwing ext3 errors whenever I’m doing something disk intensive.
My plan is to pull out the old one, move the disks to the new one, boot it up, make sure I can log into the dom0 from home, and then go home to tinker with it. If things go as I expect, the services that live on here, like this blog, my mailing lists, my photo gallery, the Rochester Flying Club web site and others should only be off the air for an hour or so.
Then I’ll test the hell out of the old box when I get it home to see if I can reproduce the problem, and then see if I can fix the problem somehow, maybe with a new IDE cable. Then I’ll know how to advertise it on eBay – either as a working box, or a box with a suspect IDE controller but a probably fine SCSI controller.