Last Friday (on my birthday) while performing some routine maintenance on my home server, I rebooted it and it never came back. It just left and never came back… like Judge Crater. The machine turns on (so it has power) and I switched enough RAM around to decide it wasn’t that, so either the processor or (more likely) the motherboard gave up the ghost.

This leads us to three things I’ve said before. One, my blog is a great source of historical information for me. A quick search reveals I bought the old server in June of 2009. Six years isn’t a great lifespan for a motherboard (he says, glancing at his still-working Commodore 64), but they’re not that expensive to replace. Two, I try to never get upset whenever something electronic dies. Instead, I see it as an opportunity to upgrade. And three, there are very few technology related problems that can’t be solved with a credit card.

My home server hosts lots of movies and music to be streamed, but more importantly it runs a few virtual servers (including the one that hosts robohara.com). I was able to pull the hard drives out and copy the virtual servers over to my workstation and run them from there for the past week, but it wasn’t the ideal situation. It kept my workstation pegged and pretty much unusable for the entire week, but at least I was able to keep the website up.

Back in 2009 when I built this (now dead) server I bought a new case that came with four fans — one in the front, one in the back, and two in the side. While this might have kept things cool, it did so loudly. While working from home and talking on the speaker phone I’ve had people ask if I were standing on a runway. So, I decided to buy a new case as well.

Unfortunately I don’t have a way to test whether it was the motherboard or the CPU that actually died, so I decided to upgrade both. I had hoped to purchase something locally but all my old “PC parts” haunts have apparently closed up shop, and Best Buy… is Best Buy. That led me back to NewEgg, where I purchased the following:

11-148-067 — CASE LOGISYS| CS136BK R — $34.99
13-128-699 — MB GIGABYTE|GA-F2A55M-S1 A55 FM2+ R — $44.69
19-113-280 — CPU AMD|TA10-5800K 3.8G 4M FM2 R — $109.99
20-231-745 — MEM 8G|G.SKILL F3-1600C11S-8GIS R — 2 @ $76.99 / $153.98

Shipping: $7.99
Total: $351.64

Happy birthday to me.

For you techies, that’s an AMD 3.8GHz quad-core processor, slapped into a Gigabyte motherboard with 16 gigs of RAM and a case that doesn’t have loud fans on the side. Also note that 4-7 day shipping for all of that stuff was $7.99, and there was no tax.

Everything arrived on Friday. I was watching the FedEx tracking so I knew when it would arrive. As far as building the actual machine went, it was one of the fastest builds I’ve ever done. Things are so compatible and well-labeled these days that I went from “stuff arriving at my house” to “server is booting” within half an hour tops.

That’s the old server on the bottom and the new server on top. And my MC Escher mousepad that I bought in 1994.

Remember those days when you couldn’t pull a hard drive out of one Windows machine and boot another machine off of it? Apparently those days are gone. Remember those days of tracking down a zillion drivers to get a new motherboard to work? I guess those days are gone, too. I pulled the hard drive out of the old server and placed it in the new one, installed the network drivers, and let Windows update itself. A couple of reboots later and everything was up and running.

Once the server was back up and running, moving all the physical drives and RAID containers over was simple. For some reason one of the RAID enclosures lost its shares in Windows, which took less than a minute to correct. The only lengthy process was transferring the virtual servers back over to the new server, which took a couple of hours.

And there you have it. The new server has double the RAM (went from 8GB to 16GB) and the virtual servers (including the one that runs this website) are flying faster than ever before.