Thecus N2100 arrived

Last saturday, I fetched the N2100 which I had on order since quite a while, put in the two 500G hard disks, and powered it on. Installing Debian to a machine with no console is pretty fun, but luckily the installer makes it all rather easy (there's this thing that allows you to ssh into the running installer and from there start the installation menu; they originally wrote that for installing to an s390 box, but obviously it works for any architecture...).

After installing the box, I upgraded the base system against security.debian.org and removed some software that I didn't need, and rebooted the thing. And then...

... nothing. It didn't seem to come up.

As it turned out, the stuff which I removed (a horrible solution to a problem that doesn't exist) just hapepned to be responsible for loading the NIC driver module; so after reboot, the box didn't have a network interface anymore as far as the kernel was concerned. Pretty stupid, that.

Luckily, fixing that wasn't too hard. Remove the hard disks, put them in another box, edit some files in /etc, put the disk back in the Thecus, boot. There.

I now have a wonderfully small system that I'll use as home server, and which will replace rock in that function. Seen as how rock is a power-hungry desktop with five power-hungry hard disks, whereas goa, the new box, is an economic ARM-based system, that'll be good for the environment as well.

Isn't that nice.

The only downside to this is that I'll now have to do some configuration and migration work, since you can't just put a disk with Debian/i386 on it in an arm box and hope it'll work. But that's okay.