Hello,

I've recently built a NAS to store files with some Raid 5 redundancy and host multimedia to stream to other places in the house. It was essentially cobbled out of cheap parts and bits that I had lying around the house, apart from the raid card and the HDD that valuable info was being stored on since I wanted to do things on the cheap. I chose to install Ubuntu Server 8.04 since it's quick (and dirty!) to install and use, and I use Ubuntu for my desktop so am quite familiar with it.

However recently, the box has started acting strangely in that it won't shutdown from a cron task or remote command (shutdown -h or halt) and it simply restarts. Very annoying since I control it remotely. Also, I came home from work recently and checked on it to find it frozen with input/output errors on the screen when I connected it up. Rebooting gave a grub error. I presumed it was the old 2.5" HDD that the OS is installed on, but I've run very thorough diagnostics on it and it comes up clean.

Sorry about the preamble, but in short I'd like to know

a) Any thoughts on the strange reboot behaviour. The RAM, MoBO, Power Supply are very cheap so could these be causing a problem, but can anybody suggest diagnostic tools to run to find out further than memtest? I've got UBCD on a USB stick but need a bit of direction!

b) What are peoples thoughts on Ubuntu Server compared to Debian? Even though the server will now boot, I think I'm going to reinstall the OS and am thinking of ditching Ubuntu for Debian but would like any further opinions as to if this is a wise decision!

Thanks in advance everyone.

My thoughts are primarily bad or loose cables (input/output errors). My fileserver locked up once and spat "input/output error" all over the console, it was down to a loose (possibly also bad) PATA cable which I eventually just replaced altogether. I never saw that error again.

Cheap power supplies are notorious trouble causers, but I can't really say one way or another what your shutdown issue is about.

Cheers for that info. I'll buy some better sata cables. Think I may have solved the random reboot with disabling various items in the bios relating to IDE drives and power management.

What are your thoughts on Ubuntu Server as apose to Debian?

I can't really comment on Ubuntu Server vs. Debian because I have never used Ubuntu server. I assume there's more automation with Ubuntu, but it hardly a stretch to make that assumption. I get the impression from people posting on the interweb that Ubuntu Server uses X by default, so it's probably quite a bit easier to use, but there's no reason you can't install X on a Debian server too (but Ubuntu's desktop will do more tasks automagically). I've been using Debian Etch on my fileserver for a couple years now and I'm totally satisfied with it. I'm looking at 148 days uptime presently, the input/output error I mentioned is the only time it's ever stopped running reliably. I guess all I can say with any qualification to do so is that I'm quite happy with Debian on my fileserver, it just keeps on keepin' on.

edit: One thing that should have occurred to me is the primary difference between an Ubuntu and Debian server - Ubuntu is based on Debian sid/unstable, a Debian server would (hopefully) be based on Debain stable (but you could use testing or sid if you really really wanted to). That is surely a major part of why my etch fileserver doesn't give me any trouble.