The official documents on Dell website:

http://docs.us.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe400sc/en/index.htm

Other docs from the community:

http://www.wikifaq.com/Dell_PowerEdge_400SC_FAQs

To upgrade memory, we normally find Crucial.com has better price, with great product quality.

http://www.nongnu.org/dmidecode/ will help to identify you motherboard type, BIOS, and other information.

dmidecode comes default with your Ubuntu installation. For other Linux distro, you can install it from the repository.

To run it, just do "dmidecode | less".

Another great tool is "lspci", which comes with the "pciutils" package that you can install from the repository.

I did an auto upgrade on the Gentoo system today, which included upgrading grub. When it finished, it printed out a message:

 * *** IMPORTANT NOTE: you must run grub and install
 * the new version's stage1 to your MBR.  Until you do,
 * stage1 and stage2 will still be the old version, but
 * later stages will be the new version, which could
 * cause problems such as an unbootable system.

This article Reducing memory usage - Firefox is a good reference on how to reduce memory usage by Firefox. Follow through the suggestions in this article will sure make your Firefox much faster.

Major points:

Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART

Linux Journal has an article introducing Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART). SMART is avaivalable in many Linux distros, including Slackware, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo, Conectiva ,and RedHat.

To install on Gentoo, do:

root# emerge -pv smartmontools

To install on Ubuntu, do:

This is a Linux server that does not have a floppy disk. It has ext2, ext3, and reiserfx on it. I want to preserve the conntent, while repartitioning the disks.

Move data in non-root partition

If the partitions you want to move or change are not root or boot, then it is easy. Just install "parted" and follow the instruction. Or do the same as in the next section "Move data in root partition" - no need to use dd. Just use tar to archive and unarchive. Use dd when you have to deal with low level stuff, such as data in /root, /dev, etc.

Dell Poweredge 1400SC

This Dell server has had some of its components changed - hard drives changed, and memory upgraded. As a result, when booting up, it asked "Strike F1 to continue".

dell.com website provides download for latest BIOS. It is said that flashing the BIOS will get rid of this "Strike F1 to continue". But I am lazy tonight. I already installed Linux on it, so I can't use dell.com's exe file to update BIOS. Nor do I have a diskette handy to create floppy disk.