lifebsideben

I bought a server last night from a guy off Craigslist. Great deal, but there’s one thing I forgot about… “real” servers are “real” loud. It’s been a while since I had a 2U box cranking all its fans in a home setting, and it’s making me wonder about the viability of this solution as a “throw it in the closet” server. Hmm.

Oh, the machine specs are dual-P3 550, Intel LX440 motherboard, 1G RAM, SCSI (9G and 36G disks installed). I’m planning to toss a 250G IDE or two in there as well and make it the superduper LAN mp3/file/cvs server/linux development box/mysql slave (backup) to prince.org’s dataset.

The guy who had it previously tested it with NT, and that lasted on it about one hour at my place. Which is about 45 minutes longer than it would have been, had I been able to find a floppy disk (ANY floppy disk) to turn into a Fedora boot floppy. I needed that because I only have Fedora on DVD, and this server of course just has a CD-ROM drive (that may change in the future…) Anyway, I finally just burned a CD with the boot.iso image off the dvd, pointed the localhost config on Apache on my windoze box at the Fedora DVD, and booted into a HTTP install on the new server. Took a while (for kicks I said “Everything”… so now I even have Russian support for KDE, etc.), but worked fine.

A little disappointed that the Bogomips for each processor is just over 1000 (according to /proc/cpuinfo) and on my rented prince.org server the single CPU is around 4000 (P4 2Ghz). I’ll have to experiment with a sequence of mysql and apache operations though, and see how they compare under “real” situations, or a vaguely reasonable fascimile. Probably the performance of this thing, properly configured (utilizing 3+ spindles, instead of the 1 IDE device on the real server now) will still kick the rented box’s ass. I’d love to be able to buy a few more cheap boxes like this and throw ‘em in a local colo, so at least I could control my own servers, instead of relying on folks 1000 miles away… and even then, not being able to throw a bigger harddrive in, etc.

Tags: hardware, linux