Update Apr 2012: I now have 3GB in my Microserver with a DVD drive, 2 x 2TB hard drives and a 1TB drive for Time Machine backups for my MBA and iMac. It is also running Windows 7 Pro.

A customer bought in a HP MicroServer as he wanted a DVD Drive fitted to it. As I was fitting it, he said that they have £100 cashback at the moment so he only got it for about £99. I just had to get one!

I have been using Amahi on my home built server (Yes, that post shows me using Ubuntu Server on it. After a month, I moved to Amahi mainly because of Greyhole) and it has worked fine. The main annoying problem I had with it was when SSHing into the server to edit the config files, I use nano. It’s easy to use and I like it. However the cursor would delete stuff sometimes as I type. Unless this is a Fedora problem (Amahi runs on Fedora, however there is a Ubuntu version in Alpha), or something that was installed by Amahi which broke it, I’m not too sure. But because of this I was wanting to move to Ubuntu Server. I’m more of an apt-get guy than yum. Plus I use Ubuntu Server on my web servers.

I removed the 250GB drive from one of the caddies and put it at top (the server has a 5.25” drive bay), and installed Ubuntu Server 11.10 64bit. The server only came with 1GB of DDR3 ECC RAM but this will be upgraded later on, probably to 8GB because DDR3 is so cheap and it can take non-ECC RAM as well which is really cool. I removed the 250GB drive from the main caddy because I was going to install the drives from my Amahi server straight away.

I had problems with the main 2TB drive which had most of my data stored on it. Not hardware problems, but I had problems mounting it on my new server. A lot of playing about with the super blocks and fscking it, I got f*cked off and gave up. I thought it would be an easy job, just plonk the drive in the new server, mount it and all should be good. Obviously not…

Because I had Greyhole setup on my old Amahi server, It had copied all my docs onto the 3 other drives that were installed. So I installed the 2TB drive I was having problems with into the new server and formatted it as EXT3. It was EXT4 before and doing a quick Google search found a couple of people had the same problem. I would rather use a file system that doesn’t do this so I used EXT3 as per recommendations from many people on forums.

After I formatted the 2TB drive, I booted my Amahi server up with a Ubuntu Live CD and set it of copying ~1TB of data from the separate drives to my 2TB drive in the new server. Once that had all copied over I plugged in each drive and did the same, formatted them as EXT3 and mounted them.

I currently have the server running with 2 x 2TB and 2 x 1TB hard drives. I will be setting up Greyhole shortly. I have installed Samba, Webmin and Cloudmin. Cloudmin is a Virtual Machine manager which sits on top of Xen or KVM. I have KVM installed as, looking at reviews and comparisons, it is faster and less CPU intensive. This is great seeing as I will mainly be using it for testing my websites, running a local GIT server and small torrent server. Also because of the low power dual core 1.3Ghz CPU.

I am liking the size of the server. It’s an ideal size and the fact it supports up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM makes it even more appealing. Me likey :)