90,000th Post! Options

[Imhotep]

This is MM's 90,000th post

Guess I'll use it to let y'all know that the system monitoring tools have alerted me that one of the fans on the server's motherboard has failed and so needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, the motherboard we've now been running on since (as far as I can remember) late 04 early 05 is no longer made, and the new fans don't have the same size (won't clip on to this motherboard), and the only fans out there that will fit are refurbished (refurbished fans, that have the same bad service history of failing...) Luckily the computer right now is down in a cool area so the fan isn't really needed, but as we know, things running hotter than they should for longer than they should eventually do fail. I don't see it as being something that will fail in the next week or so but if it does I do have a temporary system I can use to bring things back up. So, for the time being I've set up an automated image program which copies the entire system to a backup every 12 hours (12:30 AM and 12:30 PM) so if the server does go offline the most data that could be lost is 12 hours worth.

On the bright side though, figuring it's a good excuse for building a new box and retiring this 5 year old one, I'm going to be building a new server over the next week or so (depending on how long it takes all the parts to show up). It's going to be a proper industrial-class server (rather than the retired desktop computer we had been using) with 8gigs of RAM, two CPUs, and two 300GB hard drives (set up as a RAID mirror again). If anyone's interested I'll post pictures of the assembly process. Once I've finished building and burning it in I'll set up a window to move the websites and databases over to the new box. Shouldn't take more than an hour at that point.

Take care!
I