Scared but happy!

[gorgarath]

Well, I'm happy! I got a new toy to play with at work today. Well, not new. One of our old servers that isn't being used. (Oddly enough, it's actually better than some of the servers still in production.)
And better yet, I get to install FreeBSD on it! Now for the slightly scary downside of it. I get to teach my boss how to install and use it. I hate being on the spot like that because I know something is going to go wrong within the first 5 minutes of it and he's going to be like, "Well, why don't you know how to fix it?" or something... Ah well, it shall still be fun anyway.
So right now I'm doing my best to keep from turning it on and seeing what all I have to play with beyond the obvious hard drives (4x18.2GB) and dual CPU's (PIII's of some variety). I should have taken a look when I was blowing the dust out at the memory. I know it's got 2 sticks of 256 MB (PC133 ECC) since they are installed in pairs. Not sure what the other 2 sticks were, but going to guess the same, plus I pulled another pair of 256MB from an even older server we have laying around, so guessing probably ~1.5GB. Not too shabby. I just want to start playing with it, and I know my boss is probably expecting me to. As it is, I already have it almost completely set up even though it's a low priority thing.
Think I'm going to go run over to another building now to grab one of the UPS's that I know are sitting in storage...

[mike250rs]

don't let your boss touch it, unless you want to fix it.

[gorgarath]

Originally Posted by mike250rs

don't let your boss touch it, unless you want to fix it.

Haha. That works in theory, but not in practice. He's my boss afterall, what he says goes.

Plus, he's not as bad as some. He's used a *nix system before, even if it was almost 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure he'll pick up on it pretty quick, but I still hope it gets to stay "my" server. After all, the others are all his, he could at least let me maintain one. Plus, it's more cost effective to keep a FreeBSD server updated than the Novell servers. (We were apparently using Novell 4 until about 2 years ago, I've not quite put in my first year yet but still hedging some sort of hope that we might go open source some day. At least on the backend.)

Starting small, but it may grow. We have our free domain that the gov. gave us that we don't use, so we're going to set up a web server on it and probably an e-mail server for testing. Hopefully it will progress to our actual web server (or at least move ours to a host that has a better, more standards based system, looking at our site in firefox makes me cry) and e-mail server. Though, I'd not mind if he got our Groupwise server up and running either. He's already starting to think of setting up an Exchange server instead, so hoping I can fight that one with a *nix variety instead.

And on a side note, I really need to get him to install a NTP client on our main server that all our servers (and my PC) get their time from. Annoying as heckhen my clock on my computer, though completely accurtate in terms of reflecting the time on the server, is 10 minutes faster than actual time.

[mike250rs]

years back when I had a real job (bench testing at IBM).....

I was given a task to get a server up and running and setup a database. Ok no problem. They found a server and a Windows 2kAS server cd. Tossed in the innards and got her loaded and running good. Datbase gets put together. I get a pat on back.

Time goes by and another sudo manager type idiot is brought in. Mr. Idiot decides to check his email from my server. This irritates me simply because there are pc's everywhere. Within 5 min he crashes the server. For some gawd awful reason they wanted the database in Lotus Approach wich promptly lost everything during said crash. My real boss calls wondering why he can't log into the network. I told him that Mr. Idiot crashed my server(also was the domain controler). Luckly I decided earlier to create backup images nightly.

Lightbulb goes off in bosses head and Mr. Idiots cell rings. He hangs head and quietly leaves. Afterwords Mr. Idiot was not allowed within 5 feet of the server or he knew I would reformat him with my boot. Mr. Idiot didn't last much longer.

Don't remember the server model. 4 cpu, 32 mem slots, 5 drives, 2 power supplies