Serenity has arrived!
I'll start by disillusioning some of you: Serenity isn't the continuation of the lovely Firefly series (damn you, Fox, damn you), but merely the name of my new server... Still, I'm happy having it upgraded, as my previous set-up (a laptop with a broken keyboard) started having some issues, including it's hard-drive (SMART values began to near their threshold values). A quick comparison:
Old server:
- Processor: AMD Athlon Mobile XP 3000+
- Motherboard: unknown, part of an Acer Aspire 1350
- Memory: 512MB (2x256MB) DDRII
- Network: Via VT6102 Rhine-II controller (100MB/s)
- Hard-drive (operation system and data): Seagate Momentus 42 IDE 40GB (ST94019A), EXT3-formatted
- Operation system: Debian Etch (4.0) x86
New server (Serenity)
- CPU: AMD Sempron 3200+
- Motherboard: ASRock ALiveNF6G-DVI
- Memory: 2048MB (4x512MB) DDRII, running at 533MHz
- Network: Realtek RTL8211B - part of nForce 430 (1GB/s)
- Hard drive 1 (operation system): Seagate Barracuda SATA-150 7200.8 250GB (ST3250823AS) - XFS-formatted
- Hard drive 2 (data): Western Digital SATA-300 7200RPM 500GB (WD5000AAKS-00TMA0) - EXT3-formatted
- Operation system: Debian Lenny (5.0) x86_64
Still not very high-end (which I don't require) and no typical server-oriented hardware either (it was a desktop computer), but it fits my current needs and as far as it keeps on being stable as well as economic (more on that later), I don't complain :)
Another advantage of this new server is the availability of a serial port (most laptops don't have one, so neither did my previous server). A serial port might not seem very interesting nowadays, but I use it to read out my DS18S20 temperature sensors, of which I have placed some at various locations. As soon as I had connected the serial headers to a serial port, I heated up my soldering gun in order to create a 1-wire readout circuit. Once done, I connected all sensors and installed digitemp to read them out. Finally, I ditched Cacti, installed a Munin node and server, configured the Digitemp plugin and waited for results :) After some days, I get to see this:
The green line is an underground sensor, while the blue one is placed some centimetres above ground. A server-room sensor has yet to follow.