Nice glowing health LED on the front, Blue = Good, Red = Bad.
There's plenty of space behind the DVD drive, this is how much once it's installed fully.
A peep of the drive bays with the access door open.
Installing a drive in the caddy is a 2 minute task, you just take 4 screws out the front door, pop them in the drive (The caddy has cut outs for the SATA power and data so you can't get it the wrong way around).
I moved the drive supplied with the server into the 2nd bay, put my Ubuntu 12.04 hard drive from my old server into the first bay and hit the power button.
I've moved this hard drive through Four previous machines , Two had failed due to storm damage and one might have just been age/heat, the first machine was a Celeron 600 (Died with heat/age I think), this evolved into a Pentium III machine, this was replaced with a P4 running 2.4 Ghz processor, and the final machine it sat in was a P4 3.0 Ghz machine, with 2.5GB of memory.
None of these machines were new, I leave my server on 24/7 and although I make a mental note to clean it out twice a year i sometimes see Xmas come and go more than once before I do.
In fairness I think one of them was never a happy machine so although I think a storm made it fail I've since tested it and it's working fine again, I don't really trust it so will use it for some fiendish experiments.
My old desktop still runs fine, there was no real reason to change it but it seemed too tempting to keep seeing these Microservers on such a good offer.
I think my old server can file a case against me for neglect ?
Anyway, the server booted up, I expected some issues with this server having totally different hardware and CPU.
I received a message the network manager didn't start up (Drew (work colleague) will no doubt mention this constantly that Ubuntu "didn't" work.
I use a static IP on the server as I use SSH, streaming UPNP, Calibre ebook server etc and so my network card is defined exclusively in the network files.
It's expected that what was Eth0 for example will now be seen by the Kernel as a new interface i.e Eth1 or similar and the network manager will not initiate an auto start (because it's not been told to).
I think the message was "Network manager not started", Ubuntu still boots into the main environment but without network support at this stage.
lspci shows the network card is visible and recognised so no drivers should be needed.
In a terminal I started the network manager.
sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager start
ifconfig shows the network as Eth1 so I know I'm running/connected OK and it's just a minor configuration change.
I checked my interfaces file (/etc/network/interfaces) and sure enough it was still set to Eth0 so just change them to Eth1 and we're sorted
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.0.99
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.0.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.0.1
All done, you can issue a command in terminal to clean up any old or stale network states so I issued this but it had nothing to clean up.
sudo rm /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state
Reboot and the issue is resolved.
Now while Drew may chirp and cluck around my desk for a few seconds until he gets several staples in his knee I will point out to him I simply took my current hard drive running in my old server, mounted it into the caddy and hit the power button.
Had this been the Doze of Win then I would suspect all hell breaking loose from multiple driver errors to accusations of installing the software illegally and needing a new licence key etc etc.
I've had this network issue before when I moved one machine drive to another when it was static IP with unique reference to the card, had it been auto lo or similar or if this was a new build then no errors.
The next step was to reduce my USB caddies, I have 2 plugged in, a 1TB one for all the family to use and a 500GB one for backups.
The WD drive (1TB) is a nice caddy, it seems to be pressure fitted so using my trusty Compaq (circa 1980's) case splitter I popped it at the widest point and slid it around, one open caddy.
Nice and easy to get into.
I only needed to remove 4 screws (they secure the interface to the drive, top marks to WD for a solid design) , there are 4 noise bumpers (the blue rubber bits) and I've wrapped the screws in some tape.
This drive was put into a caddy, inserted and the machine powered on.
I had an fstab entry for the USB drive and expected to make a change but it mounted first time with the correct volume name (I call mine "Elements") and even preserved the little icon i gave it .. nice.
That's one caddy down, one more to go.
The Maxtor 500GB was a touch more difficult, two screws at the rear, remove a label which was stuck across the two halves of the case and a quick push with the Compaq case splitter, ah bugger it ....
I must have had this drive longer than I thought, it's an old IDE drive in there, this will stay in until it's dying day so back on with the covers.
This was plugged into a rear USB, I also popped a small USB hub in so I can use my nice Microsoft cordless keyboard (which I've not used for perhaps 2 years), the mouse for some reason has gone "sticky", I mean really sticky, if you pick it up the rubber sides stick to you and leave sticky black marks ... I won't be using that.
I also plugged my trusty Brother printer into the small USB hub, for no reason than it made things nice and tidy by not using the front USB ports.
A quick power up and everything is on line.
Initial tests are good, I don't expect Earth shattering performance, I purchased this to be quiet, I left it running last night and could hear the difference in the middle of the night, even now, sitting perhaps 18 inches to my left there's only a faint sound of some air being moved.
I did detect (during the swap over) that my original 250GB hard drive is getting a little noisy, it might be OK but it was very hot when I removed it, it seems quieter in the new server but I might replace it soon - I do have a 10000 rpm Raptor drive spare which could be interesting....
So at the moment I have Ubuntu 12.04 running with no problems at all, a tiny config change to tell it I am using Eth2 not Eth1 and everything else worked as expected.
There is a lot of chatter on the web about a BIOS mod for this server to unlock 3Gbps transfer.
I issued a command to find the link speeds supported and another to find the current speed and it's running at 3Gbps anyway so at the moment I won't do anything.
This shows the link speeds supported
kevin@server:~$ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep -i speed
* Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
* Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
This shows the link speed running
kevin@server:~$ dmesg | grep -i sata | grep 'link up'
[ 2.192072] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 3.112084] ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 3.112118] ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
I've also tested the USB hub let's me use the keyboard at the BIOS (Boot up) level which it does so everything is working great.
For less than £86 it's been a simple and painless switch, I am considering moving my Ati graphics card over from my old server (this had a PCI-E half height graphics card installed) but at the moment I don't see a need for this either.
If you're considering buying a 54l and running Ubuntu it seems a great partnership.
You can see here I'm using 466MB of memory, I suspect some of this is the graphics card (as it's on board) but I still have 1.5GB spare which I doubt I will use.
I've not changed my swap file size (this should be 2.5x Ram) and it will be using the swap file set up many many years ago ( I think Ubuntu 7 was the first one on the Celeron)... I've just checked, my swap file is 1.5GB and it should be fine.
I've also ran a hard disk speed check (read only) and I'm seeing the same speed others report, the internal drives reporting 120MB/s peak and about 90-98MB/S average, the USB drive externally reporting 30MB/s peak and 27MB/s average.
Here's how small it is, I realise I should have taken the pic before I decided to tidy up a dusty shelf above the server, things fell on it but it's OK !
Above the Microserver is the Virgin not-so-super-hub and to the right the old clunky USB drive.
You can work out it's foot print if you put a CD drive on the table, just add about an inch and a half on left and right and 2 inches on rear.
It's a good job it's got a blue light in it, it's so small I might lose it.
Update **
I knew I had forgotten something when I transferred the hard drive over, checking in the additional drivers program is always the best thing to do and it will install modems, network cards, graphic cards etc. Some are not in the default drivers and are not supported by Ubuntu developers, Nvidia are a good example, you install the card and although it will work you don't get all you could.
Sure enough this showed I needed to enable the new on board graphics card so I did that, I can tell the difference in the desktop redraw and I realize the fonts are much cleaner etc so I'm leaving it like this now with the on board graphics fully enabled and nothing else left in the additional drivers section.
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