So, I'm dinking around with that piece of machinery I'm trying to hack together, and while I'm trying to look for a label on the mobo (without taking it out), I notice the "if you're using a SATA 1.5G MB..." note on the SATA drive. I mentally kick myself, find a jumper and set the SATA drive to 1.5G instead of 3.0G, reboot, and it works!

I tried Solaris, but still no-go; I didn't think so since the VIA SATA isn't supported. I'm putting Ubuntu on it right now. It's the 6.06 beta release (final scheduled for June), but it's pretty complete from what I can tell. The Live CD boots and finds the network and (unncessary--for a server) sound card without intervention. The now easy recognition and use of the SATA drive just makes it complete; I had been on the brink of moving the SATA drive to the other machine, with an nVidia chipset, and putting that machine's IDE drive in this one; it's only 160GB while this is 250GB, so I'm glad I got it to work.

I'll remove the Ubuntu-installed servers (mail, web, database, whatever), opting instead for the same from source. I'll ensure the Java is up-to-date (1.5.06, I think is the latest). Then the harder part will be migrating the existing stuff from the failing server to this new server. My first concern is getting users over without mungning passwords; I'd like to be able to seamlessly migrate the mail accounts. Thankfully I am the only user that ever logs into the server directly.

I think I have a solid plan for getting the server data moved from the failing server, assuming I can quickly move the users (I should have gone for some centralized method like LDAP...too bad my plan wasn't consistent as far as inside or outside the firewall...).

The tougher part, but the part I can move with more care, will be removing services from this, not failing server. The only reason I want to move them to the other server is consolidation. I like using this server (paid a pretty penny for it when I bought it, and it's not out of date yet), but it's got some storage and compatibility issues. Plus the OS is a verion behind (I wanna play with Solaris 10), and I should move the "production" services off this box before I rework it.