Blog Entry

Do you ever have one of those weeks... followed by another and another? My main NetWare server in my lab has been suffering hardware problems recently - the motherboard decided to die (this I discovered after testing a different processor and power supply). Luckily my brother-in-law had an old PC with a similar motherboard that he wasn't using, so I used that, which also gave me a nice processor upgrade [not that NetWare needs much in the way of processor, but it helps the startup to run quicker :-) ]. This process had taken me about a week all told, and I was getting nervous, because this is also my mail server, and I was starting to lose mail.
So when it all powered up, I was happy, mail from the last 4 days started to trickle in and I thought I'd found a nice low-cost way to prolong the life of this ancient (more than 6 years old, like I said, ancient) machine. Little did I know that there was something else lying in wait - a couple of days ago, I rebooted the server after making some changes and... it wouldn't boot up (same symptoms as before, power to the motherboard and disks, but no video and no "beeps"). Draining the CMOS allowed it to partially boot - once, then not again. Tried 3 different power supplies, nothing helped (my theory at this point is that my original power supply may be bad, and it fried the motherboard - well both of them actually). So I was feeling a little despondent as I'd wasted a lot of time on this. I decided to bite the bullet, and buy a new server, 5 minutes online with Dell and a server was ordered, but of course there's a 2 week waiting time, what to do meanwhile...

One of my friends, Andy, reminded me that VMWARE has the facility to use a physical disk... So, taking the disk, plugging it into my main Linux box (SLES9 at the moment), and setting up a new virtual machine, I was all set I thought, NetWare started to boot... and hung at the "Pres Esc to cancel boot" message, but there was disk activity. I left it for one hour, two, and found the box was running at 100% load, nothing would respond. In the end I had to pull the power on the Linux box as it was so unresponsive. I tried this a few times, with different startup parameters, but still it was unusable. I felt soooooo close, but what was causing this? Searching through the disk parameters, I had a Eureka moment - but this time it wasn't in the bath. Change the disk type to be "persistent", so that VMWARE wasn't trying to make copies of everything that was happening. Voila! System boots, it's working just fine now as a virtual server, and when the new box arrives, I'll be doing an across-the-wire migration.

I LOVE virtualisation...

Oh, an update, based on some work I did today - it looks like the problem that caused the slowness was me making the disk the IDE slave:  changed it to master and that gave me back the speed...