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Archive for the ‘Windows Server’ Category

A little over two years ago I put together a web server to host my blog and images. That little server has been running non-stop for almost two and a half years now and during that time it has come to host several different blogs, forums and picture galleries. Although underpowered (by modern standards) it has been a trooper and has served me admirably.

But over the Christmas break I put together a new server, using a more powerful even though somewhat dated machine. The original machine is a PIII 700mhz with a gig of ram.

Go ahead and laugh. The machine was kick ass back in 2000 when I built the thing. Dual processors and 1GB of ram was a rarity in those days. Now cellphones and DVD players have as much processing power.

I have leftover machine parts all over the place, so it was easy to bring up another machine. I chose an Intel Celeron 2.5Ghz machine as my new server. Go ahead and laugh again, but I’m not trying to build some crazy scalable datacenter used by hundreds of people. I just want a blog and a place to host images, so this will be more than adequate.

Since the machine is EIDE, (you remember that format right?) I have several extra drives which I can use with it. The boot drive is 80GB and I gave it a backup drive of 120GB. And since I can buy old EIDE drives for the cost of gum, I have plenty of hardware for this rig.

It was light on the memory so I ordered up 2GB of ram which just arrived last night. I spent the break installing Windows 2003 Server Web Edition (same as the current server) and transferring everything over.

Windows 2003 is already several years old so it would be cool to use Windows 2008, but since I don’t actually have Windows 2008 yet I didn’t use it. And since the hardware I’m using is closer to 2003 vintage it seemed a better idea to match up the hardware with the OS. No reason to get the sexy new OS and put on old hardware. That would be like sticking a hot bikini model in a Pinto. You might be able to make that word, but what are you going to get out of the deal?

While it may not be uber powerful with quad or even dual cores, I should get at least two years worth of service out of this rascal before I feel the need to upgrade again. The server has actually been running or a couple days now and it looks like things are going pretty well. And by well I mean nothing has crashed.

2009 will kick off with a brand new server that has 4 times the power of the original machine. It may be old and certainly won’t raise any eyebrows for it’s processing power, it will keep things running along very nicely. And I did all of this with about 1 minute of downtime as I switched the network cables over and put the new ram in last night. Didn’t notice anything did ya? I’m stealthy like that!

I’ve been struggling with DNS issues for the past two days! Somehow the wrong entry made its way into the DNS table and I’ve been working to set it straight. The site keeps disappearing from the Internet. Hopefully now the problem is corrected and the site will stay running.

There are changes galore on the site, but I bet you won’t see a single one of them! I realized I need to fix all the gallery pages with the correct titles and descriptions. I spent who knows how long setting them all to the correct display information. It really has nothing to do with how you see the site, and more to do with seducing the Googlebot to index this site correctly. It’s kind of hard to get the right keywords when everything says “picture gallery” in it.

Here’s to hoping the site doesn’t come crashing down around me again!

I just realized there is a blog entry missing so that last comment really doesn’t make any sense. Well, ok, it makes less sense than normal since it’s completely out of content. I wrote about the server having some issues which made it unavailable the other day. I made a backup of the blogs but apparently I changed drives before I got a backup which contained that post. So anyway, here’s a recap of what happened.

Two days ago I ran into a slight issue with the server. I woke up in the morning as I always do. As part of my routine, I checked email and did a quick check on my other computers to make sure they are happy and ready to face the day.

The server gave me the impression it wasn’t ready to handle another day. This was confirmed by the fact the computer was locked up and I couldn’t click on anything. I tapped on the monitor to let the computer know it was time to wake up and face the day. None of us wanted to do it, but we had to. It was just one of those things.

The server wanted no part of this and remained locked up. Realizing I had ultimate power in the tip of my finger, I used this destructive weapon to turn the machine off. It went dark. “Ha!” I chided, “We’ll see whose Uber Powerful in this house my friend!”

Since the computer was off it was unable to make any sort of reply which really deflated my feeling of superiority.

I turned the computer back on. It still wasn’t ready to work.

Off it went again.

Perhaps the server had been engaged in a long night of partying with the other machines in the house behind my back and just wasn’t sober enough to get things moving today. I let it sit some more.

I ignored the server with impunity for a good 10 minutes until I felt it was time to go back to work. The server realized I was a force to be reckoned with and started back up.

That’s when things really got bad. And not Michael Jackson Bad. More of a Britney Spears Bad, where you really have to wonder just what the heck’s going on.

A quick trip to the Event Viewer showed signs of red. Red stop signs everywhere and just like in real they were annoying. Errors with the drive all over the place. I sprung into action like some half dressed super hero and made a back up of the data. Obviously since I lost the blog entry I didn’t get it all. I didn’t have time to be all caring and Doogie Howser with the server so I gave it the Greg House once over and salvaged what I could. Then I brought in the bug guns. Not literally big guns, shooting the server would be rather dangerous and I could hit by flying plastic shards. I cloned the boot drive.

Unbeknownst to me, this would take 4 hours. Had I read the manual I may have realized this little nugget of information before I started, but this is war Peacock, and sacrifices have to be made!

After I cloned the drive I restarted the server to see if the drive really was bad. I mean it could have been just a simple glitch or software snafu. We all know that Windows Server is fool proof so blaming the software would be a foolish long shot, but sometimes these things happen.

I didn’t get any errors with the chkdsk or another other drive analysis tool so I thought everything was OK and that Windows had just had a moment of insanity but had cleared its thoughts and was now going to get back to the business at hand of serving up my web pages.

And it did, for about a day. And that’s when we hit the iceberg.

At around 8:30pm the server completely went downhill and got itself into such a state I had no choice but to swap drives. With its innards splayed about the floor I removed the drive and popped in the new ones. I didn’t have time to scrub up; I just went in there to save the patient.

5 minutes later a new drive was in and the server was back online. Who knew you could clone Windows Server 2003 like that?

So now the server is back online with a new boot drive in place ready to face the world. Hopefully we won’t have anymore nights like that, especially since I’ve run out of replacement drives.

Here’s to wishful thinking!