My old server (the one serving this web page right now, as a matter of fact) is sitting in Alaska right now, doing a bang-up job of keeping things online. However, it is in Alaska, and I am here in Germany. That makes it difficult to keep all services online while it's moved. Thus there is a need for (queue music) "The New Server".

This time I decided to go for re­li­a­bil­i­ty and redundancy instead of con­ve­nience. For those people who haven't observed me during the design and building of a new computer... well, hrmmm... the spectacle has been described as something like watching sharks during a feeding frenzy and Weird Science (the movie) at the same time: Lots of bra-on-the-head, blood-in-the-water action; a stranger version of teen angst (whoa is me - however will I pick between Maxtor and Seagate?!?!?) along with vicious culling of the herd/parts. Obviously I enjoy it; however my wife likes to vacation during the planning stage (can't imagine why).

Anyway, I found two URLs that helped immensely in getting things up and running. The first was "SATA RAID with ICH5 on FreeBSD". That explained how to get FreeBSD installed with all partitions on the RAID array. The second was "Re: atacontrol rebuild, how?". It explained how to go about rebuilding the raid array if one of the disks had to be replaced with a blank. Handy, that.

After getting the OS installed, it's time to install the software: I began with sudo, cvsup-without-gui, por­tup­grade, vim, screen, and links. After that, we start the stuff that's more involved. That'll wait for the next article (dae­mon­tools, ucspi-tcp, and qmail).