The WSN server was down last night as I did the hardware upgrade. Working with discarded pieces of hardware is kinda cool and ecological and all that, but it sho’ is a whole lotta pain as well. That’s austerity for you. It’s so much easier to just pay someone to chop down a few rainforests and blow an open cast mine into the side of a mountain…

I picked up a discarded PIII-450MHz mobo and processor that someone left under my house (when there are motherboards discarded beneath the house, what need is there for buying new ones?), so I thought I would install that along with the hard disk for the RAID array. It seemed to work during the day when I tested it, but as soon as I got it into the server it went weird. It doesn’t help when you are raiding a stock of mid-90s motherboards to try to find a lithium battery with some juice left in it. Why couldn’t they just put in a radioactive cell that lasts for a million years?

Anyway, the whole thing was complicated because the new disk is 40GB and neither the old mobo or the new one would support it. A couple of BIOS flashing missions later still no joy; the “new” one would support but just wouldn’t boot and stay up , so it’s now installed on the old PII mobo with the 32GB limiting jumper on it. It works. I dd’d the contents of the old drive over and then did a grub-install. Don’t try this kind of thing without a rescue disk handy. You can’t change your boot drive unless you boot off a rescue CD - you will toast everything. I know.