Quote Originally Posted by Slates View Post
and I'll take a look at that while Im at it, although the box runs with heaps of spare CPU and memory, until that is SB takes all the CPU when it has a fit! - although I would assume, with it being a pretty standard Ubuntu setup, others would have complained but still worth a try.
You can flag a service not to automatically run at boot with a simple call to:

# sysv-rc-conf 'servicename' off

I'd try first disabling all those vbox services, any audio services & saned and see how things run then.

Quote Originally Posted by Slates View Post
..recently my hard disk failed (so yes I have SMART and fsk checked the new disk (100%OK)) , so I ended up doing another fresh install of Ubuntu and SB on the new disk. You know, thinking about it, I wonder if there's something about the hardware SB doesnt like - but surely dual core and 4GB memory wouldnt worry it? Hmmmm.
OK, that shoots down my theory that this was a bad-sector hard-disk problem.

In terms of SBS liking or not liking the hardware, I think it's more likely that some other process is occasionally fiddling with problematic hardware and somehow blocking SBS. As far as I know, the only system resources SBS consumes are networking, cpu and disk.

For my own servers, these are the simple rules I follow:

  • Disable all unneeded hardware in BIOS (CPU virtualization support, 2ndary NIC, serial ports, audio hardware, etc.)
  • Run the server headless, with no gui. (Not running a gui saves you loads of CPU cycles.)
  • Only run services that are mission critical (e.g. samba, sbs, minidlna, lighttpd, rsync for me plus a few hardware monitoring services.)
  • Only connect cables/peripherals that are used all the time (e.g. ethernet, usb data connection to the UPS, usb connected CM19a X10 transceiver.)
  • Keep file systems simple. (I.e. keep audio/video and other data on a separate disk, ideally with an ext4 filesystem. For the OS disk, I don't even use LVM. Why add another layer of abstraction to a file system that will remain largely static?)

Again, I'm offering these in the spirit of 'this works for me'. I'm not claiming that these constitute some sort of deity-sanctioned best practice.