Up the Irons!

I've had some computer fun and games lately...
Updated some hardware, darktower, my fileserver, is now running an AMD Athlon 3000+ instead of the Dual P3 800Mhz. The new mobo has 2 SATA ports onboard, so with the controller card Im already using I can have up to 6 SATA disks. I've slapped in one of the cheap IDE (PATA) cards I have to keep the smaller IDE drives going. (The old board has an additional IDE Connector.) So there are 4 different HDD controllers!!

Also got a shiny new 1.5TB Seagate SATA drive and chucked that in... Had some issues after that upgrade. Machine keep crashing all the time... Took me a couple of days to realise that it was some bad RAM causing the problem, so now its running 512MB instead of 1GB

After removing the RAM its running stable now. But the constant crashing had caused some corruption on my boot disk :S (the fun never ends!)
So I have reinstalled the OS... Instead of using ubuntu (had Xubuntu on there before) I have gone with Arch Linux.

Arch linux has what they call a 'rolling release' which means that unlike Ubuntu which has a new version out every 6months it just updates the current system. Much nicer on a server where you dont want to be reinstalling or having major upgrades break shit.
Also Ubuntu installs quite a bit of software (Open Office, CD burner software, image editors, email clients etc etc) which are not required for a file server. Running an update will update all that stuff which Im not using anyway
Arch linux installs only a base system and then you have to install anything (and everything) else that you want. Much nicer. But more work to get there!

Anyway its all up again and good to go for the LAN this weekend!
Darktower now has 5 SATA disks - room for one more (1x1.5TB, 1x1TB, 3x750GB) and 4x200GB IDE disks. Total 5550GB.

Also got a new monitor for my main system. A 22" Samsung widescreen. 2ms 8000:1 contrast ratio. Is nice.

Got my ticket for Iron Maiden yesterday, internet presales!
Now I just have to wait for Feb 20....

In other news, Ion, one of my cats went missing for a week and a half. Turned up one morning like nothing had happened. Looking very well fed too! I'd pretty much given her up for dead, so it was a good surprise.