Well, the main darquecathedral.org server is back up and almost completely operational. There were a few things that took more than a little while to try and get figured out, but all in all, the server is working again. The old server had a P-II 350 CPU, an old iWill motherboard with some kind of Intel chipset, and 384 MB RAM. In its place, I put in an Athlon XP 2000+ CPU, an Asus motherboard with a nVIDIA nForce chipset, and 1 GB of RAM. Of course, seeing as it had a UDMA 66 controller, an ethernet adapter, and a video adapter all on the motherboard, I was left scrambling for three slot covers to cover the holes left by unused cards.
Then, once I got the hardware installed, it was time to install the software. I went ahead and reformatted the OS hard drive and installed Slackware Linux 10.2 onto the machine. Actually, it took me two tries, as I quickly found out that the server’s CD-ROM drive doesn’t like to work when it’s on its side. Then, once that was done, it took me a while to get all of the software I generally use installed. I also had to remember some of the tweaks I put in here and there to actually get the software working nicely with one another.
In the end, I only had a couple of problem children. One was this website itself, as WordPress couldn’t connect to the MySQL database. I FINALLY was able to find out that PHP 4.4.1 (which I was using) doesn’t exactly like the new authentication that came about as of MySQL 4.1. (The old server used MySQL 3.23.58.) I got a fix in place, and everything should be good to go. The other was the Amanda backup system, but I narrowed that issue down to file permissions, a brief mail issue, and human stupidity (I forgot to actually enable the scheduled backup). That’s good to go now too.
Anyway, to summarize the whole long and boring post, the server’s back up and I have it back where I like it. More to the point, I’ve already been told by Mom and Dad (who I provide mail services for) that the server is a LOT faster than it used to be and they’re very happy with it. As for now, I’m just going to keep an eye on the server and make sure it’s working properly. That is, after lunch… heh.