For the past few weeks I’ve been getting another machine ready to replace the current file server. I’ve been setting SuSE 10.1 on a PIII 933 machine to replace the Athlon 2400+. I didn’t think I needed all that horsepower to be a file server. Actually, since I got the projector woring, I wanted a machine I could use to play games on the projecter. I know.. I know.. I admit it. I’m a game junkie.

Anyhoo, back to the server. For the past few weeks, I’ve been prepping the new server , installing and configuring all the software I’d need, in order to make the transition as smooth (and quick) as possible.
The main goal was to make it transparent to my wife. Tech support (me) gets an earfull when the technology in the house doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.

So last night I decided to take the final step. Move the RAID5 array (4x250gig drives) from the old system to the new.
I took the drives out of the Athlon system, put them in the PIII system, powered up the PIII system, and everything just worked.

SuSE recognized that the drives were part of a raid array, and created a md0 device. I then just had to mount the md0 device, and all was done.

I ‘ve got to say, that I really wasn’t expecting things to be this easy. I don’t know what I was expecting, but when I saw that on boot, the md0 device was recognized, I kinda felt giddy. This was too easy!

P.S. After replacing one of the IDE cables which was wonky, and rebuilding the volume that was on that drive, all is working.

P.S.S. I’m a little bit dissapointed that the speed of the raid array. I’ll have to do some more testing, but I fear the speed difference between the two processors might be noticeable. It seems that with disk access, I get a load average of about 1.8