my nas replacement adventure
The old NAS is >90 percent full and it’s old tech to boot so I decided to replace it with a linux server running samba. Purchased a used 2U server on ebay with RAID controller, but after installing CentOS 5.0 the system didn’t see the onboard NICs. I tried installing PC-BSD and that system didn’t see the NICs either (although the connection LEDs lit on the back and the front of the server when connected to the switch). I booted the Ubuntu 6.06 live CD (which usually sees all hardware I’ve thrown at it) and it didn’t see the NICs. I booted a Microsoft WinPE (Vista) boot CD and it didn’t see the NICs. So I finally realized it must be a hardware problem and emailed Supermicro tech support. It turned out that the NICs were disabled via a jumper on the X5DP8-G2 motherboard.
Why would anyone ship a server with the NICs disabled? And not tell the customer?
I’m not going there…now that it’s on the net I added it to DNS and can move ahead with installing disks and setting up samba. I’ll buy a couple of HP/Compaq 146G 15k drives to replace the 2 Maxtor 147G drives in the DL385, pop those Maxtors into the Supermicro and add a matching third drive for RAID 5. That’s the plan. Hopefully using genuine HP/Compaq drives will fix the problem where creating a new vmware disk crashes the RAID 1 array. Then I just copy the contents of the old NAS to the new box, wipe the drives, and sell it on ebay.
BTW I ended up with PC-BSD on the new box. I changed my default shell to tcsh and am looking forward to spending more quality time with BSD (I’ve had a shell account on a BSD system for years but haven’t ever managed one before). The adventure continues…