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Wednesday 19 August 2015

On site at Cheltenham

I made a trip down to Cheltenham today, to swap out nine faulty servers.

The last time I went was pretty recent, about six months ago. On that visit, I aimed to repair the faulty servers, by swapping out memory and drives. But that didn't work very well, and I'm now thinking that the Foxcomm motherboards I've been using for several years, have a limited life span. I'm guessing that it's capacitors wearing out, because I can't think what else it could be.

So I've replaced them all with Gigabyte motherboards, each with a fresh CMOS battery (when that battery expires, I can't power-up a server remotely, someone has to press a button, which is annoying).

Seven of them I built here; three with two 8tb drives, and four with two 4tb drives. The other two I mostly built here, and added a pair of 4tb drives salvaged from the old servers.

Because drives are so much more capacious, I don't need to use the long 1U servers that can take seven drives. I'm using the shorter 1U servers, and I put three drives in each; one being the system drive (a 300gb PATA) and the others being SATA drives. So no adapter is needed - one less thing to go wrong.

I'd allowed eight hours for the task, but in the event, it only took me two, which was nice.

So, back at the Control Center, it seems that all nine are working fine.


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