I was very sad.

I've been running my home-built Linux desktop for about 7 years. It was kick-ass. It still is. On the other hand, the power supply fan died years ago and I simply opened up the case, aimed a desktop fan at it, and kept chugging along.

That was about a 1/2 dozen OS upgrades ago. Years of finely tuning my environment.

Last night there was a POP and the magic smoke leaked out. I COULD replace the power supply, but I really did not want to. The reason I never replaced the old one was it was mis-aligned in the 1st place (because I can't build and/or choose PC parts for shit), and it was a BITCH to deal with.

So I looked around, saw the dual xeon rackmount flat box server I picked up off of Craig's list a year ago, and downloaded the latest Ubuntu server, and installed. I never used the machine before, too loud, but now I can put it behind some sound foam.

I actually ended up installing 3 times, having trashed it during grub mis-configs, but I was finally at the point of getting ready to get the data off my old system. I have a 1TB SATA disk that I live on. I popped the cover and realised there was NO extra power, NO extra SATA connection, and NO easy way of putting it all together at once. I have a SATA card, but this is a LOW rack, and this card will NOT fit in it.

Screw it. How about I see if I can simply boot off this disk?

Holy shit. It worked. My full system is back, but now it's twice as fast.

YAY! (after having blown a day)