Server up ‘n running
As no-one should have noticed, this blog is running on the new server now. Building the server turned out to be very easy, just pop in the CPU and the RAM at the correct places, connect some cables and put everything in the case. Installing ubuntu turned out to be much harder. For a starter I needed to have a CD-rom drive. Just before my holiday, I had stored a lot of stuff in my basement(ish). Somewhere there was supposed to be a working CD-rom drive. After discovering 2 scsi drives and 1 non-working IDE drive I discovered my trusty old Philips drive which has installed me many versions of linux so far. Having a working cd drive I switched on the computer once again only to discover that my shiny new motherboard (asus M3n78-emh) doesn’t work on ubuntu 8.04 by default. Luckily I used the old trick of installing OS’s: have a working internet enabled computer alongside! It turned out to be some settings in both BIOS and linux (pci=nomsi) and once you know it, it’s a breeze to install it. So the second computer was build and installed in less then a quarter of the time 
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Copying data from the 4 old IDE disks to the 2 new SATA ones
New dual server
The hardware for my new server setup has arrived. To make sure I’ve got a proper off-site backup I’ve arranged with my sister and her boyfriend to buy two identical machines, put one here and one there and mirror the content using rsync. So everything is in dual-form: 2 antec 4480b cases, 2 dual core AMD X2 4450e, 2 2GB DDR2 (actually 4 1GB but it breaks the dual flow), 2 times 2 750GB samsung spinpoints and 2 ASUS motherboards. I hope this setup will be more quiet than my current server and at least as energy efficient.
seeing everything twice
Now I’ve to go to the store to get a CD so I can burn a AMD64 Ubuntu 8.04 CD and start installing.