I've been sitting in a server room without any sunlight since about 11:30am today (with a short break for lunch). Upon entering the room, I was greeted by my old friend, the MWG server. I haven't seen it since I packed it up in a box and shipped it off to its new home here at the Grand Rapids Community Media Center. It seems like a nice place for a server with plenty of power and an environment set to a constant 66 degrees.

My mission today was to install a new tape drive and upgrade the OS. The tape drive installation went off without a hitch at all. I shutdown the server, opened the box, removed the CD-ROM drive, and installed the tape drive. Once the drive was screwed into place, I left the cover open and put the box back in the rack. We all know that it is bad luck to close a server up before testing new hardware. With the box back in the rack and all of the cables connected, it came back to life with the new flashing lights of the tape drive. I inserted a tape and made a few backups without a hitch at all. So far, everything had gone better then I could have expected.

Next, I decided to upgrade the operating system. It just didn't seem fair to leave my old friend with an OS that was over 3 years old. So, we downloaded the sources for the OS and then I attempted to make buildworld. OOPS, I got a nasty error with something about not finding a library. Hmm, after checking all of my settings, Rodney pointed out that I had downloaded the "bleeding edge" version of the OS and not the stable release. So, back to downloading the correct version of the OS and we went out to lunch.

When we got back from lunch, I attempted to make buildworld again. This time, everything seemed to go off without a hitch. It took about 90 minutes to buildworld. Once this was complete, I built the new kernel and installed it. Upon installation of the new kernel, the computer was rebooted and it gladly started up with the new kernel. I was delighted and attempted to make installworld. Apparently this new world just wasn't happy with the server I was about to install it on. For some reason I was getting some odd error messages. After a few searches on Google, Rodney found a fix and I attempted to go on with my make installworld again. But it was not to be, install was unhappy about some missing libraries or some such thing. After an extensive search of Google and the web in general, we have not been able to find a solution. In a vain attempt I cleaned up /usr/obj and am doing another make buildworld again. Keep your fingers crossed and maybe it will install and I can be on my way back home... A six hour drive awaits me.