Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)!

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:42:24 GMT

[ Warning | Ramble-ly. Pretty technical. Probably boring. I'd skip if I were you. ]

So I finally got around to poking at the 1U HP DL320 G5 server (HP ProLiant DL320 G5 C352 3.20GHz Server, I think?) I picked up sometime back off the side of the street one night on the way home from broad games. It was marked "free" and "works", just missing hard drives and hard drive mounting rails.

I finally got around to booting it up. Threw in two 80GB SATA hard drives, replaced 2x 512MB chips of RAM with 2x 1GB, bringing the total up to a respectable 4 GB.

Surprisingly, everything works except for the DVD-RW drive, which is a tad bit of a pity. Rather, the drive works on boot, but it seems to die after sometime. Ended up downloading Ubuntu 12.04 and dumping it onto a USB stick.

Ran into an odd problem where it kept thinking it was supposed to read from /cdrom. Had to switch into the shell and manually mount /dev/sdc /cdrom, then exit. Rest of the installation went pretty smoothly, aside from learning about LVM and messing up my GRUB install the first time around.

Just finished installing openssh, apache, rvm (ruby-head, etc), mysqld, memcached (not sure why I decided to install that - I'm probably not likely to get around to using it, actually), node.js...

Today I learned about "apt-cache search ...". And how to copy and paste in vi. You'd think I'd know the latter, but I usually get away with using the MacOS X Terminal, where I usually have a pointing device to select text and do your normal copy and pasting.

I just wish it wasn't so damn loud. Stupid fans. Compared to my Mac Mini (that acts as my primary server and backup computer while my laptop gets repaired*), it sounds like a hurricane. Even when the fans aren't on full blast. :\ I dunno, maybe I could sell this for $600-800 and buy another Mac Mini. Although a friend has offered to host this in his basement, and that would work quite nicely, I guess.

I guess the next step is probably going to be to find some way to mask the majority of the sound without tossing it into a closet and causing it to overheat. :\ Failing that, maybe I'll take an early vacation out to Chicago to visit my friend and install the server at his place. XD

*Wifi/Bluetooth cable managed to break. I think a combination of heat and stress and casual use resulted in weakening the surface mount adaptor head or something. Either way, covered by AppleCare and is somewhere in the repair process.

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Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:13:14 GMT

Dear Lazywebs,

I recently acquired an old Gateway laptop. I intend to install Linux on it to
1)play with opensource
2)have a secure VPN / proxy server to hit for when I travel.

Which Linux distro do you guys recommend? I'm capable of compiling things from source, although I would still prefer if said distro was being actively maintained and packages were simple to install. It'll probably be used as a headless server for the most part, but I wouldn't object to a nice WM.

Ben

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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)!