Building the New Server - Part 4 - The Problems

I've kept the tone of Parts 1 , 2, and 3 on the positive side and saved all of the frustrating issues for this post - mainly because they are not central to the building a server discussion. I'm documenting them here just to have a record of the symptoms and solutions (if any).

Problem 1: The Battery

Every time I unplug the power supply (which has been often), all of the BIOS settings go back to factory. It's not a big deal, except for clock reset back to January 2006, and the fact that the default expects a floppy drive. Fixing the time/date isn't a huge deal because of the ntpdate software, but without a floppy attached, I have to press F1 to continue. This will be a problem once I go 'headless', since there won't be a keyboard to use, and there won't be a monitor to even see the error. I guess I'll take the battery out and go to Interstate Battery for a replacement. I haven't yet looked to see how easy that will be.

Problem 2: The CD-ROM

I've been feeling bad about using the term 'ghetto' to describe the temporary CD-ROM setup, and the Political Correctness gods have decided to punish me by making it not work. I tried different cables and different CDs, but always came up with crc errors. But, I'm not ready to order a new drive that will fit in the case. This morning, I was venting to my son about it. He excused himself and returned with three old drives that he had been hoarding in his room. After hooking up the first one, I powered up the box and pressed the eject button. It was then when I remembered why I retired this drive; the drawer doesn't open without a little assistance from a paper clip. I dug one up (my wife seems to bring home dozens a week in her scrub top pockets) and gave it a little encouragement. Sitting in the tray was the Office XP Professional disk I've been missing for a year and a half! Anyway, I'm now back in business. I guess the first drive from last week didn't like being manhandled and gave up the ghost. One problem solved!

Problem 3: Still Doesn't Work!

This is the biggest of all. After spending the money on hardware, spending time on construction and installation, I still have the same problem I couldn't solve before - the network keeps disconnecting Samba and SSH (the only things I'm running on the box). I've tried a lot of things, and all I've proven is that it is an intermittent problem. I've used a Windows PC to connect to Samba, and tried mounting the old server's samba share directly on the new server. In both cases, a long copy job will eventually fail. From more than one machine, I've had SSH sessions drop. I've used different ports on different routers/hubs, and built an entirely new server. The only variable left is the software. My plan next is to try Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server version. (Stay tuned.)

For those that love details, I captured log entries from my last copy attempt. This was the server-to-server path:

smbd[4198]: [2007/02/10 16:21:01, 0] lib/util_sock.c:write_data(557)
smbd[4198]: write_data: write failure in writing to client 192.168.254.160. Error Connection reset by peer
smbd[4198]: [2007/02/10 16:21:01, 0] lib/util_sock.c:send_smb(765)
smbd[4198]: Error writing 4 bytes to client. -1. (Connection reset by peer)

smbd[4199]: [2007/02/10 16:33:08, 0] lib/util_sock.c:read_data(529)
smbd[4199]: read_data: read failure for 4 bytes to client 192.168.254.160. Error = Connection reset by peer
smbd[4199]: [2007/02/10 16:33:08, 0] lib/util_sock.c:write_data(557)
smbd[4199]: write_data: write failure in writing to client 192.168.254.160. Error Broken pipe
smbd[4199]: [2007/02/10 16:33:08, 0] lib/util_sock.c:send_smb(765)
smbd[4199]: Error writing 75 bytes to client. -1. (Broken pipe)

This was about 3GB into a 15GB directory copy. It's important to note that I can copy the entire 60+GB contents of the file server to my backup partition on my desktop without incident, so I don't think the old server is the problem.