Disaster Recovery Testing — 2
Continuing my disaster recovery testing, I had one of those peculiar moments when I realized I could survive a wee bit more comfortably with the temporary loss of the office desktop.
I remembered I now have a spare computer that does not have Nvidia video chips. I have an HP dc7900 that once was home to Windows. That computer has an Intel GMA 4500 video controller. The system has 6 GB of PC2-6400 DDR2 RAM. There are sufficient spare RAM sticks in the house to bump the total memory to 8 GB. Sufficient to limp through as a temporary replacement. Granted, DDR2 is not DDR4, but palatable as a temporary arrangement. More importantly, I would not have to deal with Nvidia.
I am not fond of HP computers. Commonly these systems are designed for business use. The chassis often is designed with little to no expansion options. Such is the case with the dc7900, but I am a bit lucky in this instance. Under the DVD player there is an empty chassis slot suitable for a second hard disk.
The office desktop has two internal disk drives.
I installed the clone backup disks into the dc7900. This was a tad irritating because the disks are in removable disk tray holders fastened with screws. To install in the HP I had to remove the disks from the holders rather than temporarily rest on top the chassis. Par for the course with an HP chassis. Conversely, this is a disaster recovery test and using the HP system in a real disaster would be temporary only.
Happily, booting held no significant surprises. I needed to refresh the ALSA configuration and network configuration. I saw an ACPI message Invalid PBLK length [7]. The message seems related to non compliant ACPI tables, which for HP is par for the course. I found nothing useful online about the root cause or remedy.
I again did not test the digital TV capture cards.
Despite my dislike for HP chassis design, this system would be more palatable as a temporary office desktop replacement in a disaster recovery scenario.
I still need to research replacement hardware soon rather than wait until an actual full office desktop failure.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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