The other night, I noticed that updates for my Fedora 8 home server were no longer available through yum.  It must have reached its end-of-life.  That’s not surprising since Fedora 11 recently came out.  It was time to upgrade.

I’ve been meaning to try out Ubuntu for a while now, so I decided to download 9.04 server and give it a try.  I’d been a strong Fedora (and Red Hat before that!) supporter for years, but for the most part, Linux is Linux, so how difficult could it be to switch.

Well, it was a painless process installing.  It took only about 15 minutes on my ancient AMD box.  But, I ran into a snag when I tried to boot.  All I got was the word GRUB repeating across the screen to infinity.  After some troubleshooting, I managed boot to the command line (the server version doesn’t come with a GUI).  I ended up having to remove all but the main drive from the server, and mess round with Grub to get it to boot without the install CD.

I thought everything was fine until I added in the other 4 drives. Then I had the same problem.  I figure somehow I ended up with a master boot record on a different drive (I have a PCI controller card that I think contributed to that problem).  When I added in the data drives, things got confusing.

It was then that I remember having similar issues the last time I rebuilt the server.  Enough was enough.  I was tired of managing 5 drives + 2 external drives on 8 year old hardware.  So, I went to Newegg.ca and ordered some new hardware.  I got a 2GHz dual core Celeron processor, a Gigabyte mother board with gigabit ethernet and onboard video, 4 GB ram, and 2 1TB hard drives.  I figure that ought to last me another 5 years or so.

Now I just have to make due without TV because I cancelled my satellite subscription a couple months ago.  Everything should be here by Monday though.  I guess I’ll just have to read a book, or take some pictures, or something like that.