Well, I went and did it. I screwed up my server again…
This time I managed to break the motherboard somehow. And it was completely unnecessary as well! I decided to take my old Soundblaster Audigy 2 sound card from my old server and put it into my current server, because I wanted to save it since it’s a pretty nice sound card. Well it seems there is something wrong with the card or something, because after I put it in the server wouldn’t boot up. Even after I took the sound card out again. Instead it only gave off a series of beeps during POST. I looked up what they meant, and apparently there was something wrong with the video hardware. Well shit, the GPU is integrated on the motherboard… fuck! There goes that motherboard. I was so pissed. What the hell was I going to do with a sound card in a fucking server anyway?!
Since the CPU I used is an old AMD Athlon 64 X2, I knew it would be pretty hard to find a new motherboard for it. But I couldn’t afford to buy a new CPU, RAM and motherboard all at once, so I started looking for a new Socket AM2 motherboard. I found one site that sold new ones, but they were rather expensive considering it’s such an old motherboard. So I decided to look at my local auction site for a used one, and I found a seller that was selling a Socket AM2 motherboard for considerably less. The only “problem” was that it included a slightly faster Athlon 64 X2 CPU and 2GB RAM. Well whatever, I thought. It was still extremely cheap and I’ll get better hardware in my server as an added bonus. The old motherboard only had 512MB of RAM! And should the CPU fail, I’ll have a backup one as well. So I bid on it and won, since no one else seemed interested.
Well I got all the things today and plugged it in. And everything works fine again! Well obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this post right now. There was only a slight hickup while first booting it up, where it said it couldn’t find the root partition even though it clearly could boot up Grub from the system harddrive. After googling a bit it turned out that I only had to re-create the initramfs for the kernel. After that it was smooth sailing. Then I took the 512MB RAM stick from the old motherboard and put in the new one as well, so I now have 2.5GB of RAM in the server. That’s a pretty huge upgrade, and I have to say it is quite noticeable. Things seem to load much quicker, including ssh logins and the web server. And with so much RAM to spare I set it up so that the lighttpd cache now resides in RAM, which should speed the website up quite a bit.
So in the end it was kinda worth it. I was only without my server for exactly a week, and now it’s much improved. Now I only have to replace my backup harddrive which is starting to fail, and it’ll be perfect again.