Forgetting why you replaced hardware

A month or so with nothing to say is not really what’s been going on, lets try to get caught up. Over the Christmas / New Year holiday I decided to move my Fetchmail/Dovecot/LDAP installation to a different machine. Now the machine I had in mind I retired back in March of 08 after having some problems when adding memory. For what I remember it was two of the three DIMM slots were bad. So when it booted fine and loaded Lenny without a hitch I figured we’re good since I didn’t intend to add any memory. Not so.

The point of the move was that box had a mobo with a small form factor their was no room for expansion and I didn’t want to do it with USB. So after getting everything moved adding Squirrelmail, Spamassassin, and Procmail I was ready to tackle the wireless card and firewall rules. That’s when I was reminded why I replaced the box in the first place.

The wireless card worked under Ubuntu and used the MadWifi drivers so getting the same result with Lenny wasn’t going to be a big deal. Unfortunately I could never get the system to boot with the wireless card in it would just stop pre-post with a long beep. That is a memory issue but when pulling the wireless card out and reseeding the memory no problems. Sigh …

So I was stuck. I suppose I could stay with wired but that would bring other challenges into play that I’ve long since put behind me with wireless. In hindsight it was not the best project to start but it was nice to go through the motion. I think the moral here for me is older hardware is good for somethings but if you’ve once diagnosed a problem don’t go back to it …. let it be !!!

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