Finally, I got around to replace my dying old server (that this site among other things run on). The old machine was an old laptop with a broken screen. Make note: laptops just don’t cut it for being up 24/7. The machine would lock up when there was just a little bit of high cpu usage (have I mentioned that I love Gentoo? :-) ).

I also had an Athlon XP that would run an UnRaid instance, with 2 hard drives. Big mistake. That thing is too costly (in terms of power usage) to have on 24/7. Even with wake on lan, it would take (for a reason I never figured out) ~20 minutes to boot unraid from a usb stick. So it was mostly off.

The new machine had to consolidate those two. When I friend offered a D201GLY2 motherboard, I took it up in a blink. In a nutshell, it’s a low powered mini itx motherboard with a Celeron 220 processor soldered on. It’s a generation behind Atoms, but provides a somewhat comparable low power consumption, but with more cpu grunge than an Atom processor. Only trouble is that the network interface is 10/100. I would like gigabit, but anyway.

I added a PCI Sata card, plugged the unraid disks, installed Gentoo on an old Seagate disk, and off it went. It took less than a day to get it up and running with almost everything I had on the old machine. Another note: Mysql databases work fine when /var/lib/mysql/* is copied over, even from a 32 to a 64 bit installation.

If anyone wonders, the cpu idles just below 60C, which is I think I bit high. A 40x40mm fan is on the todo list. The only thing left to do is combine the two unraid disks in one using lvm2. I just need to clean them up first.

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