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happy day
I finally gave in and bought some replacement parts for the server/mp3 player.
I was shopping for inexpensive, well established, and stable. I decided on a Soyo Dragon Ultra (SY-KT400) with 512M of PC2700 ram and an Athlon XP 2500+. It's designed as an overclocker's board, but all the chipsets and components were well documented and are well supported. I could have gotten more CPU power, more ram, a faster bus etc, but I don't think what I got is overkill for the job anyway.
The motherboard has platinum features so it doesn't look like your average motherboard. It comes with onboard raid (which I've chosen not to use), built in CMedia 6 speaker sound with free SPID output, free front panel USB and CF card reader, built in VIA Rhine 10/100 ethernet, the usual ultra DMA, AGP 8x (which I'm not using at all). The Phoenix Award bios allows lots of overclocker type control, but defaults to stable settings. I was actually surprised by the manual it's almost 200 pages with all the explanations of bios settings.
The physical install went flawlessly. Within 15 minutes the old board was out and the new was in and running on the old OS using the cards which I had in the old board. The first thing I noticed was that the UDMA drives were actually able to do UDMA speeds (one 33 one 100). The other board just failed out and dropped back to PIO mode. Then just to make sure things were right and clean I reinstalled the OS. What a difference! The OS install went smooth and fast. I recompiled the kernel in about one tenth the time the old system took. Installed my ports so quickly I couldn't even get a load of dishes started. The entire process, with waiting for ftp and my typing, took about two hours. I can't be sure yet, but disk access seems much more stable. I'm going to be doing some CPU and disk intensive testing (encoding and comparing sound files) so I'll find out if it's really stable.
It works now and appears stable. *happy dance*
In order to actually get the parts I had to be awake during my scheduled sleep time. I was worried about sleeping through the doorbell so as a result I ended up getting very little sleep during the day. I don't operate well on two or three hours sleep. I was able to fake it until about 11pm then I started crashing hard. A three hour nap made things much better. I woke up at 2am groggy but functional. I'll try to get back on my regular sleep schedule today.
I was shopping for inexpensive, well established, and stable. I decided on a Soyo Dragon Ultra (SY-KT400) with 512M of PC2700 ram and an Athlon XP 2500+. It's designed as an overclocker's board, but all the chipsets and components were well documented and are well supported. I could have gotten more CPU power, more ram, a faster bus etc, but I don't think what I got is overkill for the job anyway.
The motherboard has platinum features so it doesn't look like your average motherboard. It comes with onboard raid (which I've chosen not to use), built in CMedia 6 speaker sound with free SPID output, free front panel USB and CF card reader, built in VIA Rhine 10/100 ethernet, the usual ultra DMA, AGP 8x (which I'm not using at all). The Phoenix Award bios allows lots of overclocker type control, but defaults to stable settings. I was actually surprised by the manual it's almost 200 pages with all the explanations of bios settings.
The physical install went flawlessly. Within 15 minutes the old board was out and the new was in and running on the old OS using the cards which I had in the old board. The first thing I noticed was that the UDMA drives were actually able to do UDMA speeds (one 33 one 100). The other board just failed out and dropped back to PIO mode. Then just to make sure things were right and clean I reinstalled the OS. What a difference! The OS install went smooth and fast. I recompiled the kernel in about one tenth the time the old system took. Installed my ports so quickly I couldn't even get a load of dishes started. The entire process, with waiting for ftp and my typing, took about two hours. I can't be sure yet, but disk access seems much more stable. I'm going to be doing some CPU and disk intensive testing (encoding and comparing sound files) so I'll find out if it's really stable.
It works now and appears stable. *happy dance*
In order to actually get the parts I had to be awake during my scheduled sleep time. I was worried about sleeping through the doorbell so as a result I ended up getting very little sleep during the day. I don't operate well on two or three hours sleep. I was able to fake it until about 11pm then I started crashing hard. A three hour nap made things much better. I woke up at 2am groggy but functional. I'll try to get back on my regular sleep schedule today.