Shortly before Christmas, we had a power fluctuation at our house that fried the server. I got the replacement online last night, and all is good. There were a few hiccups, though.
Timeline
2022/12/18: Power blip overnight, server went down. Battery backup started beeping sometime in the vicinity of 4am, and everybody woke up. It was not pleasant. That afternoon I tried powering the server back up, and it didn’t.
2022/12/19: Ordered a replacement server. Found a Gen 10 Proliant Microserver for ~275 on Amazon, with no drives and 8GB RAM. Ordered it, then started reading about software compatibility. Should have done these two actions in the reverse order. There were some reports from a few years ago of the embedded SCSI device RAID acting wonky with Illumos kernels, but only if there were unpopulated SATA connections. I guessed that this would not affect me because I was using all four drive slots, and it was probably fixed. It was not fixed.
2022/12/24: Server arrived! It’s a tiny bit smaller than the old unit (N40L), but much better layout interanally. I transferred the drives, and booted it up. The system was able to boot from USB thumbdrive and load the configuration from the ZFS array, but:
- AHCI errors kept flooding the console (same error that was reported in years past)
- Network stack was not initialized
2022/12/26: Ordered an LSI HBA.
2022/12/29: Installed HBA, transferred drives over to it. AHCI errors unchanged. I didn’t expect this, because I wasn’t using the problematic SCSI device. The error reports from earlier indicated that it was just the on-board SATA connection that needed to be populated, but I didn’t have the right cables to connect anything to it (no available molex plugs left). Ordered additional power/sata connection cable (“slimline” SATA).
2022/12/31: Ordered floppy-drive-connector-to-SATA power adaptor cable.
2023/01/04: FDC/SATA cable arrived. Connected DVD drive to critical SATA port, and server booted with no errors. Network still not active, but system was accessible via console. The server configuration is stored on the ZFS array, so I was able to update it to attach to the appropriate NIC in the new server by inserting the new MAC address. After doing this and rebooting, the server is live.
Next Steps
At present, the server is back in the closet doing its thing. The DVD drive is sitting on top of the se rver, with the SATA cables snaking out through the front of the chassis. After the slimline SATA cable arrives, I’ll install an internal DVD drive from a laptop and seal it back up. I assume I’ll boost the RAM at some point, but it seems to be running fine on 8GB for the time being.
APPENDIX: Server Configuration
- Hardware (old): HP Proliant N40L, 10GB RAM, onboard HBA
- Hardware (new): HP Proliant Gen 10, 8GB RAM, LSI 9211-8i
- Software: SmartOS