So after a few furious hours of fiddling with computer components, and fixing them, I’ve finally gotten to a stage where I can relax and wait for Hannah to finish work. The current main server will eventually become a slave server to a new spangly server. There was a few hours downtime from around 6pm-9pm whilst I transferred the current server hardware to it’s new case.
This proved more difficult than I thought - initially I did my fun method of turning the PC on without hooking up the front panel, so using a screwdriver to short the power button pins. It wasn’t booting, but fans were coming on. Therefore I unwillingly plugged in the system speaker to find AMIBIOS bleeping at me. AMIBIOS is helpful like that - it tells you what’s wrong at POST. The video card was the problem, I tried several other AGP cards, which all yielded the same results. I had a little break and came back to it, and hey presto! it worked… strange. Next, I hooked up the hard disks, and noticed the power supply creaking and groaning as it struggled to handle this mid-to-low spec setup:
- Intel Celeron 1.7GHz
- 512mb RAM
- 200GB HDD
- 40GB HDD
- nVidia GeForce2 MX-400
- CD-ROM drive
Yes… very pathetic! So I decided to use the other duff power supply I had (the one it was using previously, whose fan has packed up so generates an enormous amount of heat which isn’t dissipating). Using this as a cue, I ordered 2 new power supplies, a standard 450W for the slave and a very shiny Nexus Real Silent 500W for the master. I’ll be picking those up from Novatech tomorrow. After that I went about cleaning the ridiculous amounts of dust off the fans, components, case etc. and re-laid the hard disks - 4 in my Chenbro hot-swap bay, 2 as a seperate array, and finally 1 as the OS and stuff disk. Also mounted is my 4-fan control unit to control the rear and front fans. CD-ROM drive obviously was shoved in, and I re-arranged the hugely complex front-panel wires to be a bit tidier.
I’m very aware of wire clutter these days, so in this build I’m going to make sure it’s as tidy as possible - less wire clutter also means more airflow, which is a great thing when these things are running 24 hours a day.
So, the new main server will look something like this:
- AMD Athlon 2GHz
- 2GB RAM
- nVidia GeForce 5700FX
- ASUS chipset on mobo
- 6x 300GB Maxtor hard disks
- 1x 120GB Maxtor hard disk
- 2 rear fans (Top/Bottom)
- 2 front fans (Left/Right)
- CPU extraction fan (Side)
- CPU heat sink & fan
- Nexus Real SIlent 500W
- CD-ROM drive
That should do me for a little while. Don’t forget, there will be a slave server as well, although it’s not really a slave as it won’t be redundant or be load-sharing with the master. It’s actually going to be a CVS repository, as I intend all the webs I run to be run from CVS (even if the client isn’t aware) as a minor back-up method.
Back-up is the reason I bought the Chenbro hot-swap bay in the first place, and now I’ve got a chance to fiddle around I’m making sure I’m using back-up well this time.
Also, I’ve decided that the now-defunct total-carnage.org domain will be used for my web hosting access for my clients and webmail. Hopefully the system (written in PHP of course) will allow clients to access their mail in an Outlook-style fashion, setup their junk mail filters, administer their websites, add sub-domains, use FTP, and multitudes of other bits. It’s going to be a mammoth project, but I think it’ll be worth it, even if it’s just for my own experience. You never know, my control panel might be the next open-source cPanel equivalent! Heh, doubtful…
