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Project: Rackmount Overkill

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How much was that sucker?

$5400 (we buy a lot of dell equip so we get heavy price cuts)

Dual AMD Opteron 4000 series 6 Cores (12 Cores at 2.6GHZ)
12GB DDR3 ECC
2x 300GB SAS6 10k 2.5" internally for the OS.
12x 2TB SAS6 in Raid 6 (20TB of space, XFS)


I'll stop hijacking coreys thread now.. :D
 
Servers..... the mercedes of PCs. In terms of setting them up, maintaining them, etc.

Can be, they tend to work for a long period of time then go jank and require a lot of attention then behave for another long period. This has been my experience anyway, seems like 6 months without problems is the limit.

Hard Drives suck... you find that quickly when you pound on them 24/7/365.
 
Can be, they tend to work for a long period of time then go jank and require a lot of attention then behave for another long period. This has been my experience anyway, seems like 6 months without problems is the limit.

Hard Drives suck... you find that quickly when you pound on them 24/7/365.

Dont say that! My servers been running without a hickup for a while now :) (A simple dual Xeon tho)
 
Yeah it mostly sits idle. The hardest thing it has to do as the daily backup :)

At most there is two 1GB LAN connections accessing it and a few wireless devices and any one time. Wish I could think of something else usefull for it to do :( (I did fold a while back but couldn't afford the energy bills) Sadly :(
 
Run various services, there are a ton out there. I set some up just to toy with them.
 
Run various services, there are a ton out there. I set some up just to toy with them.

Any suggestions? Please note I dont know a great deal about servers. Hell I even had problems setting up my own domain :( Had it working great at first then after I changed hardware could I hell get it working ok again :( And I was really keen on getting into active directory :bang head

I've stuck to a workgroup eversince.

All my fileserver does is:

> Run a 2x 1TB RAID 1 Array as a share (Soon to be a 3x 1TB RAID3)

> Is a printserver for my Ricoh AP2610n laser (Got a Epson SX425W for photos and such but I just use the built in wi-fi for that one

> Shares my HSUPA modem to a cable router (I dont have a landline)

EDIT: I use Windows server 2003R2 64-bit (Hardware will not support 2008)
 
Why in the world would you run RAID 3? You would be limited to the speed of one drive since the parity is not spread across all the disks (like RAID 5 is).

Throw VMWare Server on the box and run multiple operating systems. Test out different flavors of linux and toy around with services available to those.

You could also run a:

  • Web server
  • Database server
  • Media backend
  • FTP server
  • SSH server
  • Game server
  • Rsync server
  • WSUS server (Windows update server)
  • Domain controller (Windows and Linux)
  • RADIUS server (Wireless authentication, I hope to do this)
There are too many to list. I've done quite a few of the listed ones, but I'd like to get more experience with each. You may see an update to this thread once I get moved. I really don't want to tear down the rack. :<
 
Why in the world would you run RAID 3? You would be limited to the speed of one drive since the parity is not spread across all the disks (like RAID 5 is).

Throw VMWare Server on the box and run multiple operating systems. Test out different flavors of linux and toy around with services available to those.

You could also run a:

  • Web server
  • Database server
  • Media backend
  • FTP server
  • SSH server
  • Game server
  • Rsync server
  • WSUS server (Windows update server)
  • Domain controller (Windows and Linux)
  • RADIUS server (Wireless authentication, I hope to do this)
There are too many to list. I've done quite a few of the listed ones, but I'd like to get more experience with each. You may see an update to this thread once I get moved.

I knew the RAID 3 question would come up :) It's all my old netcell RAID card can do I'm affraid, and performance is still below a single disk :)

I would love my own FTP/WEB server but not having a landline scraps most uses for a server :(

To clarify, I use a 3G dongle on the "3" network. I get a VERY restrictive 15GB per month allowance for £15. Speeds are ok tho (Well, for the UK) about 5mb down 1.6mb up. Some people with a landline are amazed how fast it uploads as most landline ISP's are still at around 45KB/s here! Yup, the UK sucks! :(

EDIT: I will have to look into WSUS. Could you give me a quick summary of what it does? And if it's usefull on a workgroup based network? cheers
 
I'd suggest ditching the card and going to software RAID.

To run a server, it doesn't have to be public. I only have one public service available and it is locked down extremely tight. You can run a server to just play with it.
 
I've thought about software RAID. is it as reliable as hardware? And is Win Server 2003 any good at it?

I know my RAID card is c**p, I just hate seeing hardware unused :)

Mmm, not sure waht "private" uses I could find for my server? Apart from my current share and printserver setup.
 
As long as the system is stable, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Regarding Windows as the host OS for software RAID, I have no idea. My only experience is with linux.

You don't even need a "use" for the server. I just meant you could play with it internally.
 
Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought when I ran a RAID 3 on a cheap card using five 500 GB WD500AAKS drives I saw a good increased in speed. Something like 200 MB/s vs 50 MB/s of my main OS IDE drive. I'd imagine it was better than what a single had to offer, but maybe I just didn't read the benchmarks right?
 
As long as the system is stable, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Regarding Windows as the host OS for software RAID, I have no idea. My only experience is with linux.

You don't even need a "use" for the server. I just meant you could play with it internally.

One thing with the software RAID tho. The server board only has two SATA ports, used for the RAID1 system disks.

And that Netcell card wont allow use of the SATA ports being used for individual drives. It's a wierd card, maybe thats why the company went bust?

Maybe ordering a couple of the cheap 4 port SATAII cards from hong kong would do? Dirt cheap on ebay.

EDIT: I will try VMWare. I did try VirtualBox but it messed with my shared internet connection from the server :(
 
The system has been rock solid for a good while now :) As I expect from a server grade board.

If I cant scrape enough $$$ to get a hardware RAID card decent soon I might go with software RAID. It's just hard to find a 3 port + (I would like 5port) card that is cheap and uses either PCI-X or PCI-e. Could settle for a 4 port card for cheap but they still use a PCI bus :(
 
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