I finally obtained the CPU for my upgrade, a quad-core Phenom 2.5gHz. The Opteron I wanted was not available from my usual supplier. That is a lot more CPU than I need because instead of having one core idling, I now will have four but it sure is snappy when I am alone on it.
The interesting thing about this upgrade is that the floppy drive, power supply and case were the only components held over. Everything else was new. I copied from the old RAID with 200 gB drives to one element of the new RAID, a 500 gB drive. Thus, the initrd (Initial Ram Drive) would likely be missing some drivers. It was. This thing could not boot, “waiting for root filesystem” forever. After trying RescueCD, I chrooted into the new RAID and re-installed the kernel, making up a new initrd. It worked. Isn’t GNU/Linux great? How would that other OS behave with “new hardware” blues? I have no clue but I expect a lot of drivers would need installing. I re-installed my kernel from my local mirror which was on the new RAID. Sweet.
The only driver issues were the RAID, the old system booting non-RAID, and the sound. I ran alsaconf and things were good. I had to fix my /tmp permissions because I had created /tmp manually and had not been careful. X and logins had a problem with not being able to write to /tmp 
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The old mobo was MSI K8T Neo 2 and the new one was ASUS M3A78 PRO with six SATA sockets. I memtested the new RAM overnight with no problems ECC on or off. Being a power user is fun in 4gB RAM:
free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3702 3651 51 0 468 1915
-/+ buffers/cache: 1267 2435
Swap: 0 0 0
PHP pages load much faster now and the search engine seems instantaneous. This should be a pleasant experiences for other teachers at the conference in a few weeks.
I find it amazing that this machine was installed in 2004 and has never been re-installed. I did an apt-get dist-upgrade to Etch and changed everything with only a little tweaking for configuration. How many times would it have been re-installed with that other OS? HEHEHEHE Could the beast live forever? I was thinking to change the name to Behemoth but it is not that much bigger now and looks the same.
Double the disk transfer rate, 50% increase in clock-speed,, double the RAM, now with ECC, 4X the cores, switch to all SATA, and 4X the cache should be good for a while for an old guy nearing retirement but still a bit flashy like a red convertible…
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