Well, that’s been an interesting few days to say the least!
If you’ve been following me on Twitter (and if not, why not?) then you’ll no doubt be acutely aware that my home server has been up and down of late. The same server that hosts this site has been going through some changes.
First of all, I bought two 4GB sticks of DDR3 memory to increase the current compliment from 2GB to 8GB. It wasn’t desperately needed, but for £30 I thought it was almost mandetory! I didn’t have the heart to say no.
Once it arrived it dawned on me that I was running a 32-bit install of Ubuntu which, as we all know, meant that less than 4GB of memory would be used. A spot of Googlage told me that I could either install the 64-bit flavour or, and this was my preferred option, enable PAE.
PAE, or Physical Address Extension allows 32-bit systems to access more than 4GB of RAM, although it isn’t exactly ideal. While the OS can indeed see all the RAM, apps cannot access more than 4GB at a time due to the 32-bit limit.
This was going to be fine. Since ordering the RAM I had discovered the advantages of virtualisation, and thus decided that installing another version of Ubuntu on top of my host install was going to be fun. I don’t use anything that needs to access more than 4GB, and the VM was going to get 1GB to play with anyway. Great, that’s that then.
Err, no. Trying to get the PAE-enabled kernel to boot was a no-go, and I eventually gave up, deciding to instead just start afresh with 64-bit Ubuntu and install a fresh version as the Virtual Machine. I did dabble with cloning the current install into a VM, seing as the web server etc was all set up already, but that wasn’t working, either.
So, let’s install Ubuntu again.
One problem. The 64-bit version did not want to install. Booting to the Live DVD caused a black screen with a blinking cursor after the initial boot activity. The 32-bit varient worked fine. I burned another disc just in case, but that was the same. I even tried USB. No dice.
In order to see if it was RAM related, I pulled one stick. Ubuntu 64-bit booted fine.
This got me worrying that perhaps the motherboard didn’t like 8GB of RAM. The board’s maker, Gigabyte, did suggest that 2x4GB sticks was a non-starter, but forums and users suggested otherwise. Was I out of luck?
Google again suggested that there were new BIOS updates out there to try and, after I realised that my board was running its original bios from 2007, and there had been 12 updates since, I decided to flash it. Great, that should be easy….
Nope. Not exactly.
Turns out, the QFlash bios update system did not see my USB stick. Google did not help, and nobody knew what was going on. Thankfully, just before I decided to throw in the towell and buy a new HP microserver, I had an idea. What if this 16GB USB stick is the problem?
Unfortunately I didn’t have any other sticks to try, so, in a fit of genius that was surprsing considering I was quite keen on buying a new toy, I decided to create a new 500MB partition on the 16GB USB stick and see what happened.
Sure enough, QFlash saw the stick. I flashed the BIOS and rebooted. All was well, which was nice!
Then I put the other 4GB stick back in, bringing me back up to the 8GB that wouldn’t boot previously, and hit the power button. With one eye closed and the other squinting, I spied the Ubuntu screen and then, as if by magic, an install screen. Turns out that the thing just needed a BIOS update.
It seems that the original shipping BIOS for my Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R didn’t like all that RAM, and the newer BIOS updates did. Who knew!?
So, long story short, this web site is now running on a Virtual Machine. It seems to be working, and I’m now going to get around to isntalling everything else on my days off this week. I’ve also installed Windows 8 in another VM, and I’m getting into the whole virtualisation thing a bit more than any sane person should.
All done, it was a pretty crazy few days.
All in the name of learning, eh!?
