This Weekend Past

Wow, what a geeky and ultimately annoying weekend. I phoned Saturday morning to see if my new server parts were ready for pick-up and was assured they were so off Elaine and I went, only to discover when we got there that three items had been put on back-order. I don't know about you, but when someone says "your order is ready for pick up" to me that means everything is ready, not just part of it. Missing from my order where the keyboard, mouse, video card and DVD-RW. Imagine buying a new car and arriving to pick it up and the dealer then saying, "Sorry, the steering wheel, windshield, and tires are on back-order."

Well, the DVD-RW isn't going to live in the server anyway, so I could live without that, and since I was going to be retiring one of my existing boxes anyway I figured I could at least get the thing put together and an OS installed using bits from the old machines. The rest of Saturday and a good chunk of Sunday was spent playing a game not unlike "The Tower Hanoi" where I disassembled the the backup server and pilfered bits from the primary server while (mostly) keeping at least one server running. In the end I had the SCSI controller and drives out of the main server (which is running off a single IDE drive for now) and the backup server in peices (most of which are dumpster-bound) and the new server completely assembled with the exception of the missing video card.

Now for the annying part. My old workstation and server use 3.3V AGP cards, the new server's motherboard only accepts newer 1.5 or 0.8V AGP cards, and of course the video card is back-ordered. The only thing I have that will work at all is the PoS, utterly craptastic PCI video card out of the 10-year-old backup server. Fine, it should do. I put it in and one minor blonde moment later, everything fires up. So, on to installing the operating system, right?

Wrong. Red Hat gets as far as installing the SCSI driver then loses sight of the ATA CD. OK... linux hdc=cdrom. Now I get a kernel panic. OK, maybe this installer is hooped, I wonder how Windows 2000 will do? BSoD :-/ So, it's barfing after installing the SCSI driver, let's try the install without the SCSI card and only use the ATA drives. Same. Bad memory? Take out one DIMM. Same. Try other DIMM only, same. Bad secondary HD controller? Try the CD and one drive on the primary controller only. Same. Update motherboard BIOS. Same. Update SCSI card BIOS. Same. After a long series of similar trial and error that didn't end until late Sunday I determine that I have one of three problems: 1. either both DIMMs are bad - not likely, but possible, 2. the motherboard and/or CPU are lemons - somewhat more likely, but probably (hopefully) not, or 3. the motherboard design will not accept the PoS PCI card as the only video card or there is something dramatically wrong with the video card - likely but untestable until I have a 4X or 8X AGP card to try instead.

I phoned this morning to find out about the back-order. I'll be able to pick up the video card tomorrow. It turns out the keyboard/mouse combo and DVD-RW I ordered have been discontinued (Why let me order them, then!). I cancelled the keyboard and mouse since I don't really need them and got a slightly faster DVD-RW which will also be ready for pick up tomorrow.

I really hope it is just the video card and not the motherboard or CPU. I'm not enthusiastic about having to exchange those items. Nothing is ever easy with this crap. This is why, even though I am capable, I have steered my career away from the hardware and physical-layer side of things. I've crawled under enough desks, thanks.

So, for tonight, the new server is a shiny black paperweight with a gig of RAM and Gothic BC and my other sites can limp along on the half-butchered old server. The only computery thing that's going to happen tonight is maybe some SIMS Unleashed or Sim City 3000.