vir

The name "vir" comes from a character on the syndicated television show " Babylon 5". He was the assistant to Ambassador Londo.

vir is the old lennier sans the disks. In an attempt to restore lennier, I had changed the power supply to an ATX style power supply. I eventually found that the old data drive was at fault and not the original power supply.

I had also pulled the memory sticks from this motherboard when I found that the 256MB memory stick that I had bought wasn't recognized by the new lennier's motherboard. I found two 64MB memory sticks and installed them. I discovered that the slower memory stick (they were 100MHz and 133MHz respectively) had to be in the first memory slot or else the second memory stick would not be seen by the BIOS.

The next thing was to install a working IDE hard drive at least 2GB in size. I ended up going through 5 questionable drives. Most of the drives either didn't get recognized or had too many bad blocks on them. The last drive I tried actually caused the ATX power supply to pop very loudly. I reinstalled the old power supply, then decided to switch to a SCSI controller.

I had an Adaptec 2640 wide-differential controller. I installed an IBM 4 GB drive and booted up the system. When the Adaptec BIOS loaded, the screen went blank. I remembered that Adaptec controlers recognize ctrl-A to switch into a configuration mode. I scanned the bus and found the drive. I did a verification on the hard drive, which found some errors on the drive. The configuration program then hung up (not a good sign). I rebooted but the system wouldn't come up again. The VGA display wouldn't come on and the CPU fan wouldn't spin up. Everything felt hot within the system, so I pulled the power supply out. I remembered that I had an external enclosure so I put in a lower wattage power supply and pulled the hard drive out. I found the enclosure and installed the hard drive in it. I finally got the system to come up, but when I tried to scan the drive again, I found it wasn't visible. I installed another hard drive and it wouldn't show up either. I checked the jumpers and found that the active termination wasn't turned on. I turned it on, but it still wouldn't show up. I checked the scsi cable and discovered that one of the pins had not gone into the socket and had been bent out of the way. I found another cable and the drive appeared. I scanned the disk and found no bad blocks.

I tried booting into the installer for Fedora Core 6 but it would always error out at different points. I tried both the NFS image and the CD image with no success. I did have a distro called Tiny Sofa, which is based on Fedora Core but without any graphics. This suited my needs since all I needed was a mysql and web server.