Hurrah! It has finally happened. After what seems like forever, the new server is finally online.

About three weeks ago, I tried replacing my old Web server with something bigger, faster, and stronger (insert theme from Six Million Dollar Man here) but that quickly became a nightmare. After a great deal of head banging, I discovered that the BIOS was flaky when it came to supporting more than one network card. My new machine was crashing hard every few hours without any kind of message or warning . . . just plain dead.

Eventually, I discovered that there was a BIOS problem with this particular hardware (MSI mobo with AMI BIOS) but that was after I had tried a hundred different things including buying new network cards. I suppose I should tell you that this machine worked flawlessly for months with classic Linux uptime (ie: never crashed, ever) so I was very confused. After the BIOS update, the machine was thankfully stable with two network cards. I let it run that way for two full weeks before deciding I felt brave enough to try again. Brave enough happened tonight around 8:00 PM Eastern time.

It’s not the meanest fastest thing out there but with an Athlon 1800 processor, 512 MB of RAM and 60 gig of disk, it beats the old Pentium II 350 Mhz box running with 128 MB of RAM and 10 gig of disk. The WFTL mailing lists (most notably the WFTL-LUG), this Web site, the #wftlchat IRC channel, and all the other things that run on this machine should all provide much improved performance.

So, enjoy the new machine. I’m sure I will.