M&D are back from their trip to Brighton and have brought my new fileserver components back with them.

The build went pretty well – almost as quick as KK’s Quad build. The main problem was swapping the SATA cables around to get the boot drive on /dev/sda, its a bit tight with all six SATA ports utilised! I put the Intel Retail Core2Quad HSF on instead of the smaller one that came with the Pentium Dual Core, well it fits and is just a bigger bit of aluminium, so why not? I cleaned off that thick grey thermal paste crap they bundle, and applied a thin coat of Artic Silver 5. The whole box would be silent if it wasn’t for the 120mm case fan I have in there, which is whining a bit, never noticed it before with the noisy HSF from the AthlonXP-M. The CPU is at 36c at the moment, pretty much idle, so I’ll have a go at overclocking soon, although the Intel BIOS looks a bit basic for that sort of thing.

I installed Linux last night only to find that Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS with its 2.6.24 kernel doesn’t see the integrated ICH10 ethernet NIC, so I’ve now gone with the non-LTS 9.04 Desktop, which correctly loads the e1000e driver from its 2.6.28 kernel. Its no real problem as I’ll probably reinstall when 10.04 LTS comes along rather than upgrade to 9.10 in six months or whatever.

I managed to get iScan and PIPS working with a bit of tweaking (had to build a 32-Bit Jaunty VM to use alien on the RPM) although I can’t get ekpstm to work as it looks like getlibs doesn’t support Jaunty. I tested printing and scanning. NFSv4 is working and Compiz works out of the box with the integrated Intel graphics.

I’ve encrypted the two terrabyte drives and am now copying stuff across from the 500Gb’s, then I’ve got to get rsync, sudo, Samba, CUPS and so on configured.

I’m awaiting a new PSU for my ADSL modem as it seems to have died. I’ve had to knick M&D’s for now, so they’re without phone even, bloody pain, but luckily we live near enough to drive quickly and have mobiles. Its amazing that you really can’t do anything with Ubuntu without a broadband connection – even the SSH server is an optional extra not on the CD. Dunno why they don’t make a DVD with a load of packages on like Fedora etc.

Update: I got rsync, Samba, CUPS, sudoers, SSH and so on sorted and tested. I think GimpPrint (Gutenprint) may have had a driver for my Epson, but I went with the PIPS driver anyway. All my files are copied across and my backup regimen works (backup desktop to fileserver, fileserver to backup machine). It seems that you can no longer disable IPv6 as its not a kernel module but a core part of the kernel now, so I’ve changed all my services to only listen on IPv4, I guess I should configure ip6tables.

nmap v5.00 has been released as the new stable version, so I’ve downloaded and tried it out. There’s a few things that I’ve got to look into that may be useful, the OS detection and version scan seems to have come along a lot, as has scanning speed.