Five days of hardware fun, and an itinerant apf-firewall cron script

A computer server of eight years here in the zoo died  (my blog), it started with a kernal failure, which then became an intermittent fault making the thing hard to diagnose, to save time i diagnose it as motherboard failure. The old disk was ok

So the zoo had to buy a new server, however i discover that the pci spec has changed, and our year 2000 crt monitor can barely cope with the new graphics card, plus our kvm has had it.  Fortunately its not all bad, but although its old its sort of surprising that although a flat screen monitor would be nice but the old monitor has not died yet.

There is a lot of obsolete, and the thing works a charm.  Well the monitor looks the next thing to replace.

Debian likes this new box. and since networking has changed i decide to experiment with a newer firewall that although appears to work can leave network cards pingable to but unresponsive via a reload cron job.

Fortunately most of our old configs works and despite itinerant firewall script no problems we had.