Plugged in the new server last night and it's a vast improvement on the old one. Fan noise is almost non-existent when it's idling, and no matter how much CPU I used, it didn't seem to power up the fans to maximum even though it was quite a warm evening. Much better than the jet engine roar that the first one had. The only real noise you can hear is a whine from the SCSI disks.
Had some problems installing Ubuntu last night. There seems to be some problem with the CD drive on the Ubuntu server install disk. It can't mount the disk, after booting from it. I noticed last week that Aldi had super-cheap DVD burners on sale, so I might drop in and grab one tonight.
Instead I installed Ubuntu Dapper and attempted to upgrade to Edgy. There's a nasty bug with the current version of initrd-tools that causes upgrades to fail. Worked around it by manually installing a newer version, which seemed to work.
Then there's the problem with the monitor. I'm using a nasty, cheap LCD screen I borrowed from my Mum. The video card in the machine has DVI-out with some kind of adapter attached. Looks like Ubuntu in Edgy does something tricky that causes it to switch back to DVI, as all I get on this (d-sub) monitor is digital-looking noise about halfway through booting. Haven't been able to work out what's going on, but since there's no X installed, I'm a bit stumped.
I need to buy an LCD monitor anyway, so I'll start looking around.
Oh yeah, it also seems to have 900 megs of RAM when it was advertised as only having 500. Very nice. And there's still four slots left, so I can up that even more. It's RDRAM but you can get 256meg sticks reasonably cheaply, so that's at least another gig.
In other geek news, it turns out my Internode ADSL is actually connected to one of their DSLAMs. I had been advised I was on a RIM so my only option was a Telstra port, which means more cost and lower speed. Not sure what went wrong, but it means I can get ADSL goodness. For the same price as 8meg/256k ADSL1 I can get (up to) 24meg/2.5meg ADSL2+ with Annex M. Brilliant! Just waiting for the upgrade to happen now.
So Australia really does have broadband, but it's not offered by the biggest player. Yes, broadband requires fast speeds in both directions, in my opinion. It's not television.