Quimby Upgrade

The old Quimby

Quimby (the machine doing everything at *.gnus.org) has been unstable lately.  (It’s died mysteriously two times.)  So instead of investigating what’s going on, I just installed Debian Squeeze on a new machine and rsynced over all the pertinent parts.  The old Debian installation was too stale, anyway, and 32-bit, so it was probably time.

The old machine (pictured at the top) was a self-built 2U machine with a couple of disks.  The new one is a 1U machine with dual dual-core 2.4GHz Opteron CPUs.  It’s ridiculously over-powered, but what are you going to do?  It was a six year old machine ready for the scrap heap.

The new Quimby

It is bemusing that a machine that old is that over-powered these days.  However, going further back in time is usually not very rewarding.  You get into serious problems with what kind of disks they’ll accept, for instance. Even this one was problematic.  It refused to boot up if there was a SATA disk larger than 500GB installed.  So I’d either have to use an external USB2 disk (which is not a very attractive solution) or use smaller disks and RAID5 them together.  I went for the latter option, but it’s still slightly exasperating that something as stupid as that should be a problem.  The last BIOS upgrade was from 2006, and didn’t help.

Oh, well.  The travails of a free software programmer.