cleaning out my (server)closet
This afternoon I thought it was a nice time to clean out my servercloset. Somehow I’ve got several plans with it and I’ve gathered some hardware I want to put in it, now and some stuff coming soon.
First of all, last week I got another case for my fileserver, which I reinstalled recently. I could take this 19” case home, so I did, on the back of my bike (no joke…). In between rainshowers I was able to bike it home, without a scratch :D.
Any way, today I took all the hardware from the old case and put it into the new one.
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Look, there’s space in my closet! ...and a livingroom full of techjunk (sort of…).
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...and while I was at it, I did put back my old fileserver-motherboard and such back into the old case (which is an old HP Netserver E60 case BTW, I also put the skins back on.)
(The Netserver-case is going to be a spare-system. It’s got an Asus A7M266 inside, with an Athlon MP1800+, 512MB DDR, ATI Fire GL4 which I still had laying around and a 40GB IDE-drive. The general idea is to put Windows on this system, so I can finally put some open-source-Media-Center-something on my Media Center. I now also use my Media Center as my Windows-system, for compatibility-reasons, to install stuff on and such. I control the machine by remote desktop from my workstation and that works brilliantly. So… this old Netserver-case with totally different contents is just going to sit around and whenever I still need to do something ‘on windows’, I can power it up and use the system from my workstation through rdesktop…)
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And a last checkup before I put it back into my closet…
...and then… I ran out of time, so I just put the other stuff on top of it. Not very tidy or such, but it’ll run for the coming week (or two…).
So… what is it all together?
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The fileserver in the black 19” case now is a:
Asus SK8N
AMD Opteron 146 (2.0GHz)
512MB ECC REG
Adaptec 2940 SCSI-controller
9GB SCSI-bootdisk
2×200GB IDE Western Digital disks
running on OpenBSD/AMD64
...with encryption on both 200GB disks (these are going to be replaced by two SATA-drives any time soon… and then in mirror…)
Then, the Sun Ultra’s (both Sun Ultra 1 enterprises… I’ve got a few of those...)... one’s a router and one’s a dual transparent bridge, both running OpenBSD/Sparc64
The Sun which runs as a router will be replaced soon. I’ve got a Cisco 2610 with an extra ethernet-board in it, so it’s dual ethernet now and I’m going to configure that as my router, in between the dual-bridge. That should be the ideal setup to finally get to grips with this dual-transparent-bridge-project. (...and I yet have to see if this 2610 is capable of some nowadays bandwidth… I guess it’ll handle 4Mbps or such… Well, I can also make up my mind if I want/’need’ a more powerful Cisco after I’m done with this one…)
And then, one machine which isn’t in the closet right now is Elsie, my beloved 33MHz webserver… Somehow she halted today, she does that more often, but now she doesn’t boot up anymore, so I’ve got to check on that as soon as I’ve got time.
Like I said, I ran out of time, so it’s not a very big improvement right now, although having my fileserver in a 19”-case is nice. The fileserver makes way too much noise at this time by the way and I need to rewire everything I guess to get it neat and tidy. Well… this is fun stuff to do, so you won’t hear me… ^_^
And last but not least… how’s Bates doing? Weeeeeell, she’s feeling quite at home by now and doesn’t mind me geeking around all day. *^_^*
What do you think? Will this be the first cat able to do some stuff on the Unix-console-line? We’ll see… I might build her a little nice VT100-catproof terminal (fooooooooooooooooooooooood!!!) *^_^*
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Seriously, Mark, how big is your electricity bill?
haha, well… something like 130 euro a month (that includes gas, which I hardly use) which, when we convert it, would mean something like $165 a month. I’m not sure if that’s comparable. Any way, it’s about 40% of what I pay on rent.
Just keep in mind that you don’t stroke the cat before touching anything in a computer ;)
No way to cheat the electricity counter? :p
Very eclectic site.
Nicely laid out.
One day perhaps I will learn Sun/ Unix.
Hmmz, your bill is actually about as high as mine… However, I don’t feel like I have much stuff running all the time…
After attempts to make both Slackware/Sparc64 and Aurora/Sparc32 run on my Ultra1, I’ve givin up and installed openBSD.
Oh, how I long for GPE-Packagemanager. Oh, how I long to get rid of FVWM! HELP! IT’S CHOKING ME!
Although using Lynx in an xterm is quite refreshing!
hi. i noticed you have modified an old e60 case. i originally wanted to buy one of those old case’s to built a modern pc into. is it standard ATX compatible without much modifying? am jst curious because i was going to buy one from ebay. but the seller said it wasnt ATX compatible. is this true?
thanks for your help
If Ophir wants i will pay for anew e60 case .
Avner.