Time to replace some hardware

I built an updated raid pair of drives with a brand new OS for the system that underlies this blog and other services. Basically, the previous system load had been updated from debian 7 through debian 9 and had accumulated lots of cruft. So I rebuilt this using my wonderful nyble system on a lab machine. I moved most of the config over from the live system.

Switched over and spent about 2 hours fixing up the missing services (things I forgot to enable, etc.) One of the worrying things was that the BMC wasn’t allowing SoL type control anymore. Resetting the BMC didn’t help. The web interface for this motherboard wouldn’t allow me to complete a download of the launch.jnlp file.

Basically the BMC is dying. So this warrants a replacement motherboard. Given that these are westmere Intel CPUs … yeah, maybe its time to move up in the world.

Of course, that’s not all. I’ve been looking for an excuse to replace the gawd-awful HBA I have in this box. And while I’m at it, in my deskside as well.

So, onto ebay I went. Still with Supermicro gear, and will be getting a Sandy Bridge based CPU/motherboard. I can reuse my memory, so all is not lost.

I know … I should either buy newer gear, or use the cloud. Given the uncertainty of the times, I am preferring to minimize capital outflows. And the cloud isn’t practical for a home server.

So, hopefully I’ll get some new-old things to play with soon, and wind up (re)building my main home server.