For a small site like mine, it takes a catastrophe to make me upgrade the server. Today was such a day. I had a problem with the old AMD Athlon CPU fan making a really loud noise. Previously, I had intermittent crashes. This server’s upgrade was long overdue. It now has my old desktop setup: an Intel P4-2.4GHz with 1G of RAM and NVidia GEForce 6200.
I upgraded the hard drive before, so at least I could preserve my Apache, PHP, and MySQL setup. However, Fedora 7 wouldn’t boot with the new hardware, especially the on-board S-ATA controller on the ASUS motherboard. It would not find the VolGroup00 RAID setup and threw a kernel panic. I used the rescue CD and examined the /mnt/sysimage/etc setup (and a bit of google searching). I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I even tried to use the Fedora 7 disc to do an “upgrade” over my current setup. But the kernel update won’t happen because I had several kernel patches since the original install.
So my only way out was to do a real upgrade to Fedora Core 8. I downloaded the DVD ISO off bittorrent for 3 hours, ran the upgrade setup, and recompiled PHP/Apache. Now I’m back in business! Phew! Hopefully this setup will be more stable. I’m going to watch that uptime!
Tags: computer, crash, fedora, hardware, intel, linux, pentium
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