[Adminsysters] server upgrade failed

[Donna Metzlar]

Hi,

Gaba and I worked from 8am to 8pm and are exhausted, and speaking for
myself I'm pretty upset. We were not able to get the new hardware and
Debian 10/Buster running today.

This morning we did the backups, testing these and rebuilding the
machine. But after our lunch break the trouble started.

We must however tell you that we are so super cool techie and persistent
that we found the problem in the end. I would have given up a lot
earlier but Gaba insisted on _testing_everything_. Very good. Once it
was clear, that we did have a problem we put the old server back
together again, booted it and went home.

The problem was this: the new machine kept turning off after 5 to 10
minutes. We had to look in the BIOS and online. We smelt the heatsink.
It is new, so the smell could be normal. It felt hot, but CPU's get hot.
Could it be the memory, the new SSD drives? We started switching out
every part, RAM in different slots, try again. Crash. Detached the hard
disks, try again, crash. Removed the memory, the keyboard, removed the
monitor, even tried a different power supply unit, but every step ended
with the machine turning off. We found blog posts of people experiencing
the same. It was overheating and crashing.

OK let's test the common complaint then. I had seen a little fan in the
office, by one of the pc's. We got it and plugged it into the server
pointing it at the heatsink. With the fan blowing over the server it
kept on going and going. We finally removed the fan and around 6 minutes
later the machine stopped.

In conclusion, we bought a weak design motherboard model, bad luck for sure!

So, what next? I don't want us to give up on hardware. We want a machine
of our own even if it's an expensive dream and practice. I will send the
motherboard back to the shop and try get our money back.

Question now is, shall we continue with the machine in Graz, or shall we
look for a place closer to the homes of me and Gaba and whoever else
wants to be root on the Systerserver? And should we perhaps aim for a
larger form factor machine? If so we need a new chassis, plus power
supply unit. When to try again? And so on. Lots of work to be done still!

Donna