This is pretty straightforward, but not obvious.
I followed directions from the web on how to download an ISO and burn it to a USB drive using MacOS tools.
Alex (my 14 year old) and I took apart the machine and replaced the drives, with no problem. Previously, SMART tools were telling us that the 2009 era desktop 1.5T drives were going bad, so I bought a couple of 3T WD Red NAS drives, like the ones in our Drobo 5N. (LTS is long term support, so that in principle, we will not have to do this again until 2017. This post is about the adventure of installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it. In a previous blog post I wrote about the month elapsed time it took me to back up that machine. The third one was pretty idle, just hosting about a terabyte of SiCortex archives. Now one of these machines is our compound mail server, and another runs mythtv and various other services. We wanted to upgrade the OS’s, but they had gotten so far behind that apt-get update wouldn’t work.
We ran the then-current Ubuntu, and only sporadically ran apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.įast forward to this summer. We put mirrored 1.5 Terabyte drives in them, and 2 GB of ram, and they have performed very well as pretty low power home servers. This might be the 1000th blog posting on this general topic, but for some reason, the complexity of booting grows year over year, sort of like the tax code.īack in 2009, Win and I built three low power servers, using Intel D945GCLF2 mini-ITX motherboards with Atom 330 processors.