Even the last part was a big problem. It turned out that the company
that delivered the package, delivered it to the wrong address! Just
consider, a package with a value of approx. 1000EUR delivered to the
wrong person without any authentication of that person. Incredible. In
any case, alternate will hear from me about this.
Setting up the server itself also wasn’t easy. It turned out that the
rocketraid 2300 card was perfectly recognized by the BIOS but that the
RAID card didn’t recognize any of the hard disks attached to it. After
a lot, and I mean a lot of trying, I finally found out that the drive
were recognized only after booting up a linux system in the regular way
(on a disk attached directly to the motherboard), after loading the
driver. So, apparently, this is some sort of compatibility problem of
the card with the BIOS. Anyway, I managed to get an installation
running and I am now booting from CDROM as a work around using a home
baked boot cd.
But now in any case, the server is up and running and it is already
hosting most of the services. As you are reading this, the page is
being served by the new server, and should be noticeably faster than
before. The only thing it isn’t fully configurted yet is
the mail server, but that will take some more time. I have already
progressed up to the point that it receives e-mail and that the e-mail
can be accessed with imap. Now what remains is making sure that imaps
works, and setting up basic spam prevention and spam filtering. If I
spend some time on it, I should be able to get everything to work over
the course of this week so that I can switch off the old server.