openSUSE and a depressed server

A couple of months ago, my server/workstation got depressed, i.e. it was very down. Down to being no more than a blue powerled. No traces in the log files, no indication what it was not happy about, which I found quite annoying, mostly since I didn’t have a clue of what was going on. I ran memtest for 48 hours, no errors at all, checked all file systems, ditto. Then my wife called while I was away, reporting beeeeep, beep, beep. Checked on the web, yes, videocard dead, which she confirmed, since the monitor did not respond to anything. A new videocard brought it back to life.

But no happy ending yet. The box’s mood showed some improvement, but it was still down for a couple of hours per day. Since my wife’s activities to find a job rely on it something had to be done. So I spent approx. € 200 and bought a Phenom X6, a motherboard and 16 GB of DDR. I prepared for a night of hard work to get it back to being a happy 24/7 server. Which I shouldn’t have: I remembered making a photo of the BIOS disk order and connected the disks (6 in total) the way they were ordered on the picture, connected everything else, plugged in the power chord and switched it on. Whoopiee, GRUB, yeah, it boots, checks filessystems, all OK, withing 20 secs I have a kdm login screen !!! An hour and a half for disassembling and replacing the hardware, most of the time consumed by putting the wire-mess away properly. Slightly different from the hardware upgrade on a windu server I did this summer, which took 2 long days.

Again, openSUSE / linux rocks.

PS. While writing this I tested VirtualBox and the 2 VMs I never use, yep, they need reactivation :P. I paid for them, so I guess I’ll have to, but …