13 steps

My new ‘little’ toy, weighing in at 50kg. Powered by a single Xeon 5050 DualCore processor (second one’s arriving next week), it’s fun.

Eventually this is going to be the new server powering my sites and everything else, but that could take a few months. On the one hand I first want to experiment with a lot of different unix/linux distros, and on the other hand I still need to upgrade it. It only has 512MB ram at the moment, and fully buffered PC5300 DDR2 isn’t exactly cheap seeing as fully buffered only gets used by servers. Also you can see the single harddrive laying on the floor, it’s a small crappy sata drive I borrowed from work because I still have to buy a couple of decent drives. And then there’s the trays… the drives have to be mounted in trays, which cannot be bought from HP because they only sell them with drives. Cheapest I’ve found them online is here, which is still quite expensive for a dumb piece of plastic.
I also had to rip a DVD drive out of another of my comps because the Proliant came standard with a cd-rom drive… Hello, it’s it’s 2007. Speaking of which, for some reason the onboard graphics chip has an absolutely pathetic 2MB of video ram, meaning in for example Ubuntu I couldn’t get a higher res than 640×480. So I had to find a compatible PCI-e card which fits a 4x or 8x slot, I could only find a Matrox Millennium, which I fortunately managed to get cheap second hand.
All in all I think this could cost me about 1000 euro to get to where I want it to be, which is quite a bit of money, but it’s also dirt cheap when you consider that by then it’ll be a total monster. Can’t buy it new for that kind of money.
I’m looking forward to getting all the kit in and experimenting with virtualization, especially with the new .20 kernel now out and programs like VirtualBox and Xen.