Thursday, July 31, 2008

New Server: Assembled; RAM not so good


RAM Keychain
Originally uploaded by mrgaskell
Well, the new server parts arrived, and have been assembled. Most everything went well. The 2024MB of RAM I ordered was defective (I think), so i need to return it. Memtest86+ showed over 10million RAM errors on both sticks in under an hour. Thats somewhat disappointing. Tomorrow, I'll be at the mall to pick up a new stick to test. If that doesn't work, then the motherboard must be fried. The point is, something is going back to Geeks.com. Until then, nothing can get installed.
Also, I think my two older IDE drives are bad, but that could be the RAM too.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

My New Server- Hardware



My home network setup simply requires a server. On that server, I run Subversion, Samba, and Apache2 with Bugzilla, Media Wiki, and Subversion access. In the past I've use the latest Ubuntu Desktop release as the OS, running on an old Sony Vaio Workstation I had lying around. This worked fine until yesterday, when Sony's notoriously unreliable (1st Gen) hardware finally failed, leaving me serverless.
I'm still not entirely sure what went wrong; I haven't had time to investigate. But, I was able to order enough hardware to build a new server from the ground up. It isn't anything to high performance, a personal server doesn't need to be. But it should be significantly better than the seven-year-old Vaio. These are the specs:
  • 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 CPU (Single Core)
  • 2 New 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD's + 2 Old 120 GB 7200 RPM HDD's (Total of 1.24 TB storage!)
  • 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 Memory
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • 10 Bay ATX Case with 9.8" Fan on Side (See picture above)
This hardware should be great for my needs of personal Web/File/Subversion server. Everything should be here on July 30th or 31st. I'm planning on doing a video of the unboxing and assembly. I'm also going to write install guides for all the software (starting with Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition, then Apache2, openSSH, MediaWiki, Subversion, etc). Check back soon...