OT - New PC

[Tim Watts]

Who's good these days?

I need a new server for the house - 2 SATA disks, 2TB each, reasonable processor, lots of RAM and quiet. Good and reliable is the order of the day.

And can anyone recommend a decent make/model of home grade UPS - "online" type so it conditions the shitty brownouty power we have here?

I run VMWare at work on expensive hardware, so I'm totally out of the loop these days on regular grade stuff :-o

Long story short - my home brew server was off when I got home as the kids had accidently turned the socket off. I pushed the power button and it produced the most f*ck off bang and flash I have heard since our old valve TV blew a cap in 1974 or so.

Luckily, after gerry rigging a "spare"[1] PSU in, it eventually ran up and I have DNS, DHCP, data (I do have backups anyway) and IMAP back.

[1] The PSU was nicked out of the sister server that ran SMTP and web. That PC can have its functions merged to the first one.

Anyway - these are 6-7 year old PCs - it was time I guess. But they get some abuse from the mains here which can be a bit shitty so a UPS will not go amis.

Thanks for any suggesstions - in the meantime, I'm going to start with DABS/Ebuyer just to see the overall options...

Cheeers!

Tim

[Huge]

They still doing those cheap HP microservers?

were doing £100 cash-back on these at one point.

[Tim Watts]

Thank you sir - I am liking the look of that. Reviews say quiet and powerful.

I think it is time to get some hosting for email (I do stuff that Gmail does not offer) and web and DNS. OpenVZ looked interesting there...

[The Natural Philosopher]

I put together an intel ATOM MB Nini ITX in a mini case. LOW POWER. QUIET (no CPU fan)

Runs 2 x 1/2TB disks, could run 2x 2TB No extar slots for DVD so it was built with one disk and then the DVD drive removed and the second disk installed.

512MB RAM - enough for headless.

Its twin core 64 bit..plenty of get up and go for serving.

Usual Linux/Samba/NFS/Apache/DNS/Appletalk/printer server s**te.

Love it to bits. Just 'works'

Fully fast enough to saturate 100Mbps LAN

Its not quite as cheap as a dedicated server on sale offer - cost me a couple of hundred IIRC.

I have it on 'don't auto-boot on power up'

If power goes down the whole LAN goes down and stays down till I bring the bits up in order.

Router server desktops.

Its paid for itself in electricity saving by now. Must be three years old.

[Tim Watts]

Sounds very nice. I may need something with a little more oomph - I want to saturate a gig lan.

====

I must admit to being surprised that, given the bang, that the PSU did not fry the mobo.

Have just transplanted SMTP over and that's all back now... Good enough for the moment. Got 4 disks running off a single PSU cable though - OTOH seems not warm so probaly OK.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Shouldnt be an issue.

Atom boards come with gigabit ether. I just haven't got a gigabit switch :-)

Its about 4 times slower CPU wise.. than my dual core celeron desktop.

Disk speed is generally the limiting factor.

But SATA is good. Should be up to 6GBps

And you can always add more RAM to increase buffers.

I've been very pleasantly surprised at how fast a dual core 1.8Ghz atom actually is.

[chris French]

They are great little boxes. I've had the previous model running as server here for a couple of years quite happily.

And yes the seemingly never ending cashback offer is still running. Can usually get them for around £230, sometimes a bit less (the deals vary). So they really are a steal for about £130.

Popular little boxes, so Plenty on the web about them.

[Tim Watts]

I just found that Ebuyer are doing the cashback - just off to cost it with the required RAM and disks.

[Bernard Peek]

I bought a second-hand mobo+ processor on Ebay for 20 quid. Dual core

2.5GHz. It's got embedded graphics and sound, but it runs fanless. I think the outfit I got it from has some more, but I can't guarantee the price.

[Mike Tomlinson]

I got one with cashback from Quidco plus the £100 HP cashback, paying

119 quid in total. Cracking little machine. Two 2TB drives in it, running CentOS.

[Broadback]

looking for.

[fred]

The cashback is not dependent on the seller (as long as they are HP authorised resellers, ie everbody you know the name of), it's handled by a separate outfit on behalf of HP (quite efficiently and helpfully IMV).

Agree they are great little boxes but check OS compatibility as they are definitely server OS oriented. XP isn't officially supported but you can find drivers if you are prepared to spend time and a little effort, just don't expect it to be a trivial job.

[Dave Liquorice]

Ooo.... who did you buy through to get the Quidco cashback? I don't thin= k e-Buyer are there.

Looking at e-Buyer it comes with 2GB Ram and a 250GB drive. Anyone know =

what the drive is? My current server has 160GB and is only just over hal= f full so 250GB is ample.

Adding another 250GB drive to get RAID and a PCI NIC to get two ethernet= ports (server acts as router/firewall as well) doesn't sound too much additional expense.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Drives tend to be the most expensive thing in any server I build...

Generally case/PSU about 70 MB about 70, pair of drives? over 100.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Dave Liquorice escribió:

It was HP themselves, buy anything via HP through a Quidco clickthrough and you got 6% cashback. That was a while ago though. As someone else said, the 100 quid cashback is done by a third party fulfilment house - just follow the instructions to the letter and the cheque comes a couple of weeks later.

Mine was a Western Dig I think. Took it out and used it elsewhere. I have an old 40GB drive in the optical bay for the OS and two RAIDed 2TB drives for data.

Fitted 4GB of memory - it's dirt cheap at the mo and Linux will gladly use every last byte for caching.

Note you don't get an optical drive as standard, and the drive trays are not hotplug.

The slots are half height IIRC, so grab a NIC that has the HH bracket in the box.

[fred]

Don't know about the N40L but on the earlier N36L it was a VB0250EAVER which is a badged Seagate ST3250318AS (Barracuda 7200.12 250GB) with HP firmware ID. You don't want to buy one with HP tag though, they list at about 260bucks but that does include a free microserver caddy ;-)

[djc]

+1 on that I have two here, 4x2TB (RAID) in one. The other I use as a desktop, with a AMD FirePro 2270 and two 1600x1200 screens.

I got mine from:

[tony sayer]

In article , Tim Watts scribeth thus

Can't help you with the server but as to UPS we've now given up with APC they cook batteries, bloody things.

We're now using EATON ones mainly 2200 to 3000 KVA but far better performers and seem to be more dependable. Not that cheap but I suppose all down to what you want to spend etc....

[Dave Liquorice]

HP Direct =A3239.00 + VAT =3D =A3286.80 e-Buyer =A3239.98 inc VAT...

That might be an issue to install the server OS from an ISO but I think = I can install over the LAN. Always assuming there is enough on the device =

as it comes to boot into something that can access the LAN. Has USB though so I guess a bootable USB stick could be made for that?

This mention of trays rings an alarm bell. Are they suplied to take a bare drive or do you have to fork out more to HP for a bit of expensive =

bent tin?

It won't need an optical drive when in use, it'll sit in a corner withou= t monitor keyboard or mouse... I assume it uses USB for those as I see no =

mention of keyboard or mouse connections.

[Tim Watts]

Yes - linux generally installs from USBs - many ISOs are hybridised (or can be with a simple tool) and can be copied to a USB and just work.

Bent tin and wonga - I noticed that.