Take the guts from an old machine, put them into a new case, and you have a shiny new Linux server which will be good for years to come!

This is a pictorial story of my building Avalon, my new Linux box.

1. The new case and various parts lined up on the kitchen table... looking like a bomb site - again!

   

2. 5 hard disks... one brand new 200GB, two 160GB, and two 80GB. The spare 40GB on the new drive won't be fault tolerant, all of the other ~80GB 'chunks' will belong to RAID-5 arrays.

   

3. The motherboard has been removed from the old case and is ready to be transplanted.

   

4. I felt quite guilty and stupid as I moved the board from the sturdy, heavy-as-a-rock Aopen case to the new generic made-in-China-for-twopence effort, but the end result is fairly impressive. It's as good as a new computer. Beige is so 1985!

   The old case sits on the floor awaiting her date with the dustman Jeedzilla makes an appearance too, as I needed to swap some components over and borrow her DVD-RW drive to install Debian Sarge from DVD-R.

   

5. Sigh...

   

6. This was a quick build - straight out, straight back in again.

   

7. Nearly done! I had to swap the optical drives later as the old DVD-ROM drive wouldn't read a DVD-R.

   

8. There were no instructions with the case and I didn't know what these parts were for! I worked out later that it's the speaker.

   

9. Time to power her up...

   

10. Installing Debian Linux.

    

11. The machine looking nice. It's much prettier than Jeedzilla!

The specification:
AMD Athlon XP1800
Soyo K7V DRAGON motherboard
1x512MB PC2100 DDR RAM
ATI Rage Fury 32MB graphics
Sony CD/RW drive
2*80GB, 2*160GB and 1*200GB IDE drives in RAID-5/LVM arrays