Teleidoscope

Tue, Sep 25, 2007

Server Spec

Posted at 8:13 pm MDT to Technology

It's been a long time since I built a PC from parts. And most of th eparts I built Igor from have been obsolete for ages. But I 've been wanting a home server machine for a while, and I decided that I need to learn some of the high end hardware and admin. So I have specced out and ordered the parts for a serious enterprise grade machine with lots of redundancy and error correction and high availability components.

I will probably need to invest in a few more fans and drive cables, but most of the system is all in this one order. I may harvest a floppy drive from one of my old systems...

• Antec P140 Silver rolled steel case. No windows, no blinky lights. Just a clean metal case designed to be quiet and keep the parts insode cool.
• Antec 850 Watt ATX12V/EPS12V high efficiency power supply
• Tyan S2928 Dual ATX Motherboard
• 2 Dual Core AMD Opteron 2210 Processors
• 4 1 Gig sticks of DDR2 ECC Registered RAM, providing separate dual channel, error correcting ram for each processor, to allow a NUMA SMP configuration
• PNY NVS 285 video card (the official specs say it supports Linux)
• a Samsung 20X SATA DVD burner
• 4 Samsung 500Gb SATA Hard Drives -- this will be configured as a 1+0 RAID array, so it really isn't two Terabytes of available storage
• a tube of fancy Thermal compound for connecting the CPU Coolers to the procesors
• 2 Zalman 9500 CPU Coolers

The Newegg.com order page said it would take them a couple of days for them to fill the order, and it will be sent standard 3-day UPS, so everything should arrive some time next week.

I think I'll download Fedora 7 some time this week, to . I don't think I want to try to deal with NUMA SMP and RAID in Kubuntu's screwy admin environment.

In the meantime I need to think of a name for the new machine. My previous home machines' names were vlad, igor, soteris, xerxes, bast, ulysses, and thoth. And the current laptop is sophia. Since the new server will have two processors, I should find a mythological character with two heads ... or two faces, but Janus feels wrong. Maybe a pair of twins.

Something to think about while I wait for the hardware.

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