Code|Beta

If you’ve been following my blog lately you should know that I recently got two new used servers to play with. Now if you’re wondering why I need servers at my house…well you’re not the only one asking that question and the answer…well I haven’t come up with a really good answer but I use them to test things and learn as well.

Due to electricity limitations in my computer lab, yes I have a room in the house that has only my computers, I’m unable to power up all of the servers at once…which is a real bummer so I’m looking for an electrician to come to my house tell me that I’m crazy and get something done so I can power them all up at the same time

So I managed to get one working but not without going through some, what appears to be, required troubleshooting.

The servers were tested prior to being shipped by my friend who sold them to me. Something must have happened along the way that brought the whole troubleshooting on a friday night upon me, well actually I started yesterday when I hooked it up and saw the NMI LED power up and the server not boot only to find out, like an hour later, that it was the raiser cage that was incorrectly seated…sigh

Today I was trying to get VMWare ESXi installed so that I could create several virtual machines and I ran into problems where the server wouldn’t boot off the CD so at first I thought it was memory

So what I did was swap the memory modules on this server with the ones on the other server that I got. The good news is that it wasn’t a memory problem since the issue persisted though I did leave the 1GB of RAM that I put into the server…after all this is going to be the VMWare server and everyone who knows about virtual machines knows that the more resources available the better.

My next step was to swap the CD drive and this was in fact what was causing the issue since after I swapped the drives I was able to successfully install VMWare ESXi on that machine and get it up and running. At this point I have done some basic configuration of that software in that server and ran a virtual machine with DOS and some games, which I must say runs pretty good.

The server has a total of 3 Ethernet ports, out of which two are currently plugged into the gigabyte switch and teamed at the VMWare level so that the server has a total of 2GBps of network speed. The other Ethernet port will eventually be connected to the ADSL modem as this machine will run the firewall as a virtual appliance so that I get the physical Sun Netra T1 back to make it do something else. All of this is still in the planning stages and we are going to have to test the performance of this system since the most load comes when my mom is talking to my little sister over Skype with video chat.

This is going to add to the noise level in this room due to it’s 2 rows of 4 fans for a total of 8 fans which are in charge of cooling the two Intel Xeon 2.66GHz processors and everything else in there. When first powered on they are pushed to their limits which causes for a really loud power up but after a couple of seconds they are taken down to a more quiet level where they keep the system at a sustainable temperature. If it gets warmer then the fans will have to speed up to cool down the server and if they’re unable to do so the server will shut down.

Due to the fact that I don’t have this room cooled by air conditioning I won’t be able to put in the 6 hard drives that this server can handle, also I would need to get another power supply for the server since it only has one currently, so I’ll be getting 1 to 2 more hard drives for this server and other 2 hard drives for the other server which will basically remain off until I’m able to get the necessary hard drives for it…so yes I have a big and heavy 1U paperweight.

I’ll definitely will have to start working on getting this room sealed and cooled by air conditioning but I don’t have the budget to do so right now so that will definitely have to wait.

For those who wonder what name this machine has received…well it’s named R2D2

-LM