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New Year New Server!

Posted: Sat 07 Jan 2017 8:19 pm
by westonweather
My old ACER server had been 100% reliable until it suffered a hard drive failure on it's raid array. The trauma of shutting it down and changing the failed drive was all too much for it and it's proven to be unreliable ever since - with it's latest error telling me that the other drive was about to fail too.

I was online looking for replacement drives when a mate suggested I tried one of the "mini PCs" that are arriving by their hundreds from China - at not very much money! £75 is all I paid.

I picked up a Z83 1.5Ghz quad core machine with 32Gb of SSD - more than enough for my needs. It comes with Windows 10 preinstalled - but before I did anything else I got in and disabled all but the bare essentials on it. I then installed the original installation files that I had for Cumulus & Xampp then proceeded to over write these by copying the directories off the old server straight on top of the new installation - it worked a charm! 4 hours or so later and the new server is happy running my email server, MYSQL server, Apache & Cumulus. I have also set a program to copy the entire C drive onto my NAS every night so I always have a recent backup - in case these SSDs prove to be unreliable using it as I am...

One huge benefit was that I was able to move the server into the conservatory from the garden office, meaning one less UPS is needed and the power consumtion is vastly reduced. The old server was drawing some 180W, the new one just 2W!

I don't have a monitor & keyboard attached to it as I just VNC in from my laptop if I need to check on it. In fact it has just 2 cables - the power cable (12V) and the cable to the weather station console!

Here's a pic of it installed in it's new home with the weather station console beneath it (hosted by itself!).

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Time will tell how reliable - or unreliable this proves to be, but I love trying new things - and have backup files in case the worst happens and I need a plan C.