Forward Progress

Well, I’m a little further ahead.

A new EVGA PSU and a cooler which actually fits into the 4U chassis have arrived today.  I’ve now swapped out the old Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO (say that five times quickly) with a more svelte Cooler Master GeminII M4 heat sink and fan. It doesn’t seem to cool quite as much, but it still works fine. It’s doubtful that I’m going to do any crazy over clocking on this box now that it’s going to be hidden away inside of a server closet. I also have installed the newly minted Ubuntu Server 16.04 onto an extra 256GB Samsung Pro SSD drive that I had kicking around from Netkine days. This is replacing the 5 x 3.5” Ultra SCSI drives which totaled a whopping 45GB worth of storage.  Four of them were 9GB Seagate Barracuda drives, and the last one was a 9GB IBM drive.  Do you remember when IBM made disk drives? Me neither.

Oh, funny thing about installing Ubuntu.  The only spare USB drive that I could find happened to be in the form of an Apple Camp Wrist Bracelet that had been given to the kids by a family friend who works for Apple.  Weird thing about it though, was that in El Capitan I couldn’t seem to get UNetbootin (the thing which writes ISO images to USB sticks) to work.  I ended up having to use:

$ sudo dd if=ubuntu-16.04-server-amd64.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1024

That worked like a charm, but first I’d fiddled around with Disk Utility and even fdisk and couldn’t seem to manage to get UNetbootin to recognize the USB drive. Not sure what’s up with that. Two problems are still left. The two 92mm fans in the chassis sound like an F-18 taking off, which isn’t going to work out well in my server rack. Also, the four of the drives were sitting in a 5.25” drive bay and the last one was bolted onto the side of the server. Unfortunately the machine doesn’t have anything that can handle the SSD drive, so I’m going to need to get an adapter.