Month: February 2004

The Mr. Smarty Pants Archive at the Austin Chronicle. Get yer useless bits of trivia here!

Get caught with a gram of weed, get a mandatory-minimum of 10 years in federal prison. Kill a man over a prank, get just one year. Welcome to the USA.

Dean to end presidential bid today. He is a victim of absurdly high expectations…

Hostile people may be predisposed to smoking. As a smoker, I think the guy who came up with that study is an asshole! (kidding)

Bush’s trustworthiness ratings at an all-time low. Maybe it has to do with those WMDs that weren’t in Iraq.

February is always a month of much rejoicing at our office. The reason for this is simple — it’s the month when bonuses roll in. Yes, when it seems that everyone else gets an extra dose of holiday cheer in the form of extra money in the ol’ pay packet, we are made to wait an extra two months. Then again that’s not a bad idea, because February in the New York area is a rather “blah” time of year, so the boost is always welcome.

This year I thought I’d do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: build a server from scratch. I’ve had a pretty good idea for a while of the specs that this machine should have:

• CPU: twin Athlon MP processors, 2200+ or above
• RAM: 1GB registered, ECC RAM (2x512M)
• Disks: 2x80GB Serial ATA (SATA) disks in raid 1 configuration

Fortunately for me RAM prices are quite reasonable these days, and the growing popularity of SATA make it an increasingly attractive alternative to budget-buster SCSI drives. In other words if it weren’t for SATA I’m not sure I could afford to do this!

I actually put in an order for the components today, so I can be a little more specific about what this machine will end up like. I ended up getting all the gear from the same web site, and if they decide to sponsor these articles I might even tell you who it is and link to their site :-).

CPU

I’m an AMD man. 7 of the last 8 computers I have purchased have had AMD processors, so it’s quite the ingrained habit with me. I think this is largely due to a poor experience with a Celeron-based laptop I bought some time ago. As such I was looking for Athlon MP processors from the very start.

I ended up settling for a pair of Athlon MP 2400+ chips. This of course meant not getting the top-of-the-line processor, but then I seriously doubt that an extra 200mhz here or there would make altogether that much difference in the dual-processor configuration; after all this is not a 3d workstation we’re building here!

Motherboard

Initially I was leaning heavily towards getting the Asus A7M266-D, as I quite like Asus boards; in the end however I went with the Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW-P, mostly because it was cheaper and had the same chipset anyway (all Athlon MP boards have the same chipset). Also there were a couple more issues with the Asus board — some of them had USB 2.0 and some didn’t (different revisions), plus it had integrated sound, which is pretty useless for a server. Why pay for features I’m not going to use?

Memory

That was pretty simple actually — I wanted 1 gig, so I got that, in a 2x512M configuration because 1x1G was too expensive. If I ever need more than 1G memory it will be because the site sees so much traffic that it will easily pay for the upgrade at that time (yeah, I’m a dreamer). I got Kingston brand, ECC, registered PC2100.

Disk Controller

SATA might be gaining in popularity, but it’s still mostly available by using an external controller; it’s definitely not included on the Gigabyte motherboard. So I went for an Adaptec 1210SA board, which is somewhat low-end but (according to the description) supports raid 1 (mirroring). In practical terms what it means is that I will have two identical hard drives attached to the controller, and every time the server writes something to the primary hard drive it will also write a copy of the new addition to the second hard drive. In case of failures the “backup” drive can serve the purpose of the primary one. This is a common configuration for web servers.

Hard drives

SATA drives, having only become mainstream recently, tend to be huge. The very smallest ones I could find are 80 gigabytes in size. To satisfy the raid 1 requirement I purchased two 80G Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drives. I’ve mostly used Maxtor in recent years and have been quite satisfied with those drives.

Power

Another important item is power. An athlon processor typically requires quite a bit of juice, so you can imagine what two will need! I went for a Thermaltake 480w dual fan power supply with “active PFC”, which seems to be Thermaltake’s new buzzword for “it distributes power intelligently”. We’ll be able to see if this holds true or if it’s just marketing hype.

Cooling

Athlon processors definitely need a decent cooling solution; I fried one just by running it with the heatsink slightly off! Each of the processors will get a Thermaltake Volcano 11+ Xaser edition heatsink and fan. These are rated for the 3200+ processor so it’s a bit of an overkill, but you can never have too much cooling. In fact I had to restrain myself from getting a water-cooling system (I’m not made of money).

To sum up…

There’s only one thing I can guarantee — this will be one sweet, kick-ass system. Next week we’ll begin the process of putting all this stuff together, and configuring it for optimal performance.

In a defiant move, San Francisco officials marry lesbian partners. Expect the army to move in on the Castro next.

Former officer says the Texas National Guard ‘cleaned up’ the President’s records. Surpringly enough The Smoking Gun isn’t there (yet).

Tank for sale on eBay, no bidders found. Gee, doesn’t *everyone* want one of those? I mean, that would make the neighbors stop complaining about your dog on their lawn wouldn’t it.

Mozilla.org unveils Firefox, the best browser out there. It’s not just a must-have, it’s the official browser of this web site!