I have new server hardware I have been testing, it is not from the certified list because it is a home server I cannot afford commercial server hardware, the selection of the hardware was the subject of a post I made recently in the SME 7 forum. The hardware is :-
ASUS TA-9A1 VENTO Midi Tower Front 4xUSB 1x FireWire and Audio 450watt PSU
Gigabyte GA-880GM-USB3 AMD SB710 4xDDR3 VGA GLAN 6xSATA2 RAID USB3.0 MicroATX
AMD Phenom II 550 DualCore 3.1GHz 7MB CACHE 80W
Kingston 4GB(2 X 2GB) DDR3-1333MHZ KVR1333D3N9K2/4G
2 x Western Digital 500 gig 7200rpm SATAII DS GREEN POWER 32meg Cache
LG 22x DVD+/-R Burner SATA Model: GH22NS50 DUAL LAYER
This hardware is to replace my existing hardware running SME 7.5.1, I reailsed I took a risk getting the latest technology which could have problems with 7.5.1, the MB has the latest BIOS. My initial testing was on 7.5.1, I did have problems, I have found workarounds for these problems but the workarounds seem to impact on performance but I can live with that until 8.0 is released. I am now testing SME 8.0beta6 and I have some questions and issues, it is configured as server only for testing and has been restorred from the backups from my 7.5.1 server and gateway server, I obviously changed the IP and name after the restore as both servers are on the same network.
Question 1. My old server does a backup to a USB disk using the DAR backups built into Server Manager, the server is slow and a full backup takes longer than 24 hours so I time out the backups at 23 hours and inc1 picks up the rest of the full backup the next day. My question is when I do a full restore, if I pick the backup set and then say select inc3, am I right in assuming this will restore inc3 + inc2 + inc1 + full which is what appears to happen.
Question 2. The handling of mountable drives in 8 is different to what happens in 7, what I mean is in 7 my fstab has mount points for the CD-ROM, floppy and USB disk which are added during boot, in 8 this does not happen and I had to add the entry and cerate the directory in /media so I could use my USB disk. Is this the way it will be in 8, if so, will there be documentation to say what to do. In the header of fstab it says to look at
http://www.e-smith.org/custom/ which is now a dead link or look at the template fragments in /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/fstab/ but I don't know what I am supposed to do with these. I know there are USB issues with 8 at the moment, is this related.
Issue 1. I have the data from my 7.5.1 server on the 8 server and I run the same USB backups, a full weekly backup followed by incrementals with 3 sets. Things work fine then I get this email randomly.
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DAILY BACKUP TO WORKSTATION REPORT
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Backup of wombat started at Thu Oct 21 11:25:02 2010
Backup of mysql databases has been done
Mounting backup shared directory localhost/media/wd001
*** No backup allowed or error during backup ***
Error while mounting /media/wd001 :
mount: can't find /media/wd001 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
The reason for the error is that it is looking for /media/wd001 but it should be looking for /media/WD001 which it has foung during the previous backups, I also noticed that there is now a /media/wd001 directory. If I go into Server Manager > Backup or restore > Configure workstation backup it also shows /media/wd001. If I now go Next the Backup share in the drop down window is still showing as WD001, if I go Update without changing anything and then look in Configure workstation backup again it is now /media/WD001 and the backups work again for a few more days before it happens again.
Issue 2. During boot it displays "TSC appears to be running slowly. Marking it as unstable" and pauses for a couple of seconds. Using Google I find this is related to the clock but I don't have any problems with the clock or anything else and everything seems to be stable, is this something to worry about. I notice that in the logs before I get the previous message there is "Time: hpet clocksource has been installed.".
I am relative new to these forums even though I have been using SME Server for years, what I am looking for is guidance. If you think I need to raise any bugs please tell me and I will do that.
Thanks, Lloyd.