Testing a server before installing an OS

Our development server at work is taking a dump on us. So at this point, we're repurposing some other servers we have in our server room for this purpose.

My boss wants me to test the servers before I even try installing anything on them. How do we to about this?

The UBCD has several benchmark/stress testing utilities built in. Just burn it to a CD and boot it up, no need to install anything. I've used it several times to stress new production systems.

The UBCD includes

• memtest
• CPU burn-in
• Benchmarking tools (run once before, and once after)
• And a bunch of disk diagnostic tools

Works great.

Alternatively there is Stress Linux, but it hasn't been maintained very well. It does include several tools that are useful for stress testing: bonnie++, memtest, and stress.

The linux program stress is excellent. Allowing you to test memory, CPU, and disks with one program.

First thing I'd do is to run memtest on them to absolutely make sure that the RAM works properly (see http://www.memtest.org/, they have an ISO file available for booting from CD-ROM).

Then I'd install Debian or Ubuntu and run some I/O benchmark software while carefully watching dmesg/syslog for any disk related errors. (Linux is free, your boss shouldn't care.)

Then I'd download several large files from a FTP server while pinging something to make sure that the network connection is reliable.

Edit: Poster elsewhere made a good point - don't install anything if it already has the OS you want to use!

It depends a lot on what type of tests you need to run. If it's just to check and see if they still basically work any of the Live CD versions of Linux will work (Knoppix, Ubuntu, ...).

I'd like to at least mention SpinRite, if testing the hard-drives/storage as part of the system.

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm