My Linux server, which I bought back in 2011, was getting flaky, crashing and freezing up with alarming regularity. So the first thing I tried was ripping out the two nVidia video cards – I’d originally put in two because I was using it as my daily driver and running three monitors (including a 4K), and didn’t need them any more because I only had one monitor on it and rarely logged into the console since I switched to using a MacBook Pro and then later a 5K iMac as my daily driver.
But that didn’t really help much, so I started looking at a replacement, and instead of getting a JNCS motherboard bundle and then finding my own case, power supply and drives, I bought a complete system from JNCS. However, in anticipation of getting the new system, I bought two new 4TB drives to replace the 3TB drives in the existing systems. And after I’d finished migrating the data from the 3TB drives to the 4TB drives and took the 3TB drives out of the system, the random crashes stopped! Shit, I didn’t have to buy the new system after all!
But anyway, the new system arrived. I moved the two 4TB drives and the two 256GB SSDs from the old system and fired it up. I had a hell of time swapping cables around and between SATA ports because I’d get the BIOS to recognize 3 of them but not 4 of them until I found just the right combination. I think a new set of SATA cables might be in my near future. After getting the BIOS to recognize the 4 drives, I could not for the life of me get it to boot from them. The grub menu would come up, but it couldn’t find the /boot partition for some reason. I tried booting with a live image to repair the boot, but couldn’t get it working, so I said “screw it” and just installed a new Kubuntu onto the built-in NVMe drive and restored all the required functionality from the old system.
I also had a hell of a time with the 4TB drives – they were RAID-1 with LVM on top of them, but the new system wouldn’t recognize them as RAID-1. I tried various “mdadm –assemble” commands, with no luck. Finally, I said screw it decided to just nuke it and start again. I used fdisk to re-write the partitions and did a “mdadm –create” to create a new RAID-1, but as a complete surprise to me, the system immediately recognized the existing LVM system and gave me back all my data!
Anyway, it’s working great now and one of these days I’ll be confident enough in the new system to reformat and repurpose the old SSDs. And boy does that NVMe drive boot fast!
| 2007 Machine | 2011 Machine | 2019 Machine | |
| Processor | Intel Core2 Duo E6360 1.82GHz 4MB Cache, 2 Core | Intel i7-2600K LGA-1155 3.4GHz 8MB Cache, 4 Core | Intel CoreTM i7-8700T Processor 12M Cache, 2.40 GHz to 4.00 GHz Turbo, 6 Core |
| RAM | 2x1Gb DDR2-800 | 4x4GB DDR3-1333 | 2x16GB DDR-2666 |
| Disks | 2x500GB HDD, 2x1TB HDD | 2x500GB HDD, 2x1TB HDD | 500GB NVMe, 2x256GB SSD, 2x4TB HDD |
| Motherboard | Intel DQ965GFEKR | Asus P9H67-M EVO | Asus PRIME B360M-A |