GNU/Linux: Server Upgrade Problem Solving

[ Thanks to Gene Alexander for this link. ]

"Recently my company had the opportunity to upgrade a server to Mandriva 2010 that was running an old version of the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution. The system had been in place running along nicely for a few years and had not been upgraded to a new release in all that time except for some security patches. Then it started hanging mysteriously whenever under load from users opening Squirrelmail with large amounts of mail in the INBOX. Looking at logs, checking settings and system files revealed nothing. However, once the system was taken off-line, brought in-house to ERACC and the cover removed we discovered there were several popped capacitors on the old motherboard. This was determined to be the source of the hangs:

"This old Gigabyte motherboard was from near the beginning of the AMD dual-CPU era when one could first put together a system with two AMD Athlon™ MP CPUs in it. It had a pair of these installed (AMD Athlon™ MP 2400+) and 512 MB of RAM. The Gigabyte board also had two PCI 64-bit slots, one of which was in use with an Adaptec 29160 SCSI controller that controls two SCSI drives. These were in a Linux MD RAID1 configuration except for the "/boot" partition. The small business owner of the server did not want to buy an entirely new server due to the current poor economy (Thanks to our current USA presidential administration and a complicit Congress. The bums.) and cash-flow being so tight. A new server could easily end up costing well over a thousand dollars."

Complete Story

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