On Thursday the day had come to get the server and storage put together. After eating a hearty Mexican (“salad”) meal Victor and I proceeded to my condo to begin the installation. After assembling all the parts Victor remembered there was one last piece he forgot to have me buy – the power cable converter for the SATA drives.
So – it was off to Frys. On the way there we discussed possibly buying a new (cheapo) PC instead of trying to run the server off my old computer. We looked at the PCs and also tried to compute the cost of building one. We finally zeroed in on buying one. First, however, we (or I should say Victor) had some technical questions for the salesman – Richard Cheeseman. Yes, “the cheese” as his peers called him, would take us on a long journey. Once we decided on what PC (a crappy Presario) to get he had to hunt for it “in the back” and then hunt for it some more… and then get some help to try to find it because “it says there are 5 in stock back there.”
Eventually a big cardboard box was heaved into my cart. Then I noticed it had two “open box – reduced price” stickers on it for different amounts. Once four employees were used – and a trip to customer service taken – the Cheeseman produced a sticker for the wrong amount. It was time to go back over to the PC section (again) and then back over to the customer service section (again) to get the right amount.
Two hours after we walked in – I walked out with a crappy PC and a “free” printer.
twenty minutes later we we opened up the PC to find – it was the model with a celeron processor (i.e. was deemed TOO crappy) and 500MB of RAM (again – a little TOO crappy) that we didn’t want. Victor was convinced it wouldn’t really matter that much anyway and wasn’t worth returning. However, we realized we’d be returning anyway as we forgot to get the power converter we had gone to Frys to pick up in the first place.
Time was backing up. When we returned from Frys the second time Victor quickly installed all the hardware and started formatting the two 500GB SATA drives. It was clear it was going to take a very long time so we decided to finish Friday.
On Friday Victor came over around 8pm. He decided it would be smart to remove all the preloaded ad-ware on the Presario. Because Compaq doesn’t want you to remove its advertising – each program took a while to uninstall. We even went and got coffee during one particularly long and painful uninstall.
Several hours and several problems solved (all by Victor) later (1:30AM)- I had a server with 500GB of RAID (i.e. backed up) storage. Although, I’m having trouble setting up accounts now – so that is why I haven’t given anyone out there their login yet – because I can’t create them! Victor has promised to come over again (round 3) to fix the glitches and make administering the whole thing easier.
I also don’t have any of my music back at home yet because we discovered Monday that my PC at work has outgoing FTP transfers blocked for some reason (most likely a company intranet security measure). The ban should get lifted for me – but this is (understandably) not very high on the list of IT department priorities.
