Since my file server is effectively my gaming cabinet, rebuilding it fit better here then anywhere else.
As mentioned in other threads, my old file server recently died. Since I run an Active Directory domain and this machine served as the DNS/DHCP profile server too, it took down the rest of my network with it.
It was a hodge podge of equipment I assembled as cheaply as possible about 8 years ago and gradually updated. I make a decent living, but I still like doing things for as little as I can get away with.
The case itself is a good example; I spotted it in a dumpster while at the Lee's Famous Recipe drive thru in Somerset. I grabbed it, gutted it, cleaned it up, and viola, a full tower with 11 total drive bays for free.
I traced the failure to a blown capacitor on the motherboard, which somehow took the system drive and two of the data drives with it. Pretty freak thing really, but I've seen worse before. In any case it wasn't worth rebuilding since I had another box on standby. Here is a picture of it gutted of the drives. Its going back to the mini graveyard at an office I keep in Morehead for spare parts.
The case had an interesting quirk; one of the drive racks actually sits above the power supply. Since pretty much every drive slot in both racks was filled, and the case in general was a bad cooling design, I had to have no less then 14 fans in it.
-CPU Fan
-Video Fan
-Power Supply Fan
-HD bay cooler (rear bay)
-HD bay cooler (front bay)
-*2 auxiliary exhaust blowers (black units occupying the bottom 2 expansion bays)
-1 Front intake fan
-2 auxiliary intake fan sets (3 fans each; grill units occupying top two external drive bays)
When running it sounded like a Sabb Turboprop sitting on the tarmac, but it least it stayed cool. 8 years service life isn't bad for any server, especially a home made one. Here were it's last specs:
| Chassis: | Gateway 2000 ATX Full tower |
| Processors: | *1 PIII 800Mhz |
| Memory: | 1.5GB PC133 |
| Internal Storage (All ATA 133): | *1 20GB (System)
*2 40GB (Data)
*1 12GB (System Utility, Virtual memory)
*2 200GB (Media storage)
|
| External Storage: | *1 HP SCSI 24GB Surestore Tape Backup
*1 CD/DVD ROM
*1 3.5 Floppy
|
| Video: | 64MB ATI |
| Sound: | Onboard |
| OS: | Windows 2003 Server
-Active Directory Domain Controller
-DNS
-DHCP
-File and printer server
-Terminal Services
|
May it rest in piece.....
Well, I had a dead server, and had to get it going quick. Conveniently enough, for almost two years now I have had a Dell Poweredge 1600sc sitting and eating electricity. It was purchased, still in the box, from a Korean family having a move sale for $70. Not a typo. They sold me an untouched server for seventy bucks. Made me nervous enough to run the serial, but it's legit. Almost makes me feel guilty cause they had to be crazy or really strapped. Such is the way of business though.
It was meant to host an NWN2 upgrade of an NWN world I had going for some time. But NWN2 sucked, and everyone had been pulled into WoW before I could get it ready. So it sat. I would occasionally run some DB projects out of it, and I would use it as a fast OpenBOR compiler unit, but that's about it.
Now my old one was dead, and not worth fixing. The catch is, the Dell was a pretty bare bones model and only had a single SCSI drive in it. I thought about grabbing a few more and taking advantage of already having a SCSI controller, but SCSI drives are not only insanely expensive, it's almost impossible to keep up with all the differing standards. Chances are, I'd get the drives and then find they wouldn't work with my controller at all. I could have just shoved my remaining ATA 133 drives in from the old server, but doing that just seemed, I dunno, wrong. That left SATA. So I finally decided to buy something for once and picked up a Raid5 capable SATA II controller and two 1TB drives.
Here is the drive bay with the SCSI drive and two SATA II drives in place. The SCSI is the system drive, and the SATA IIs are storage. They run hardware Raid I, meaning that they are mirrored without any software or load on the CPU; the system sees them as a single drive, and what goes on one goes identically on the other. So I actually only have 1TB of storage, but if one drive fails, not a single byte is lost and the system doesn't even slow down. I'm free to get a replacement at my leisure, and just hooking it up is all that is needed. It will be formated and mirrored automatically.
And here is another with the drive assembly in place.
There is also a reason why the SATA drives are on the bottom. In the pic below you can see the cooling design. The chassis is divided by a baffle into 3 sections, and each one works like a wind tunnel. The power supply draws air for the top section, a front fan forces air through the bottom to cool the expansion boards, and a large fan in the back draws air for the drive bay and motherboard.
As you can see, the idea is that the drive bay assembly being itself part of the middle air intake will give the drives plenty of cooling. The obvious flaw in this design is that if the hard drive bay isn't full, air is just going to pass through the biggest gap between the drives without really cooling any of them. So by putting the SATA drives on the bottom, their heat will rise into the airflow and be expelled. Were they on the top, air would simply flow underneath and barely cool them at all, plus they would be cooking the system drive. I could space them out, but it's not that bad and I'd rather have them together so I know which are which. I'll be adding more drives later, which in turn will work into the case's cooling design and fix the problem anyway.
Everything done but plugging in the second processor....
Final specs:| Chassis: | Dell Poweredge 1600sc |
| Processors: | *2 Xeon Dual Core 2.4Ghz |
| Memory: | 2.5GB SDRAM |
| Internal Storage: | *1 80GB SCSI (system drive)
*2 1TB SATAII on RAID1
|
| External Storage: | *1 HP SCSI 24GB Surestore Tape Backup
*1 CD/DVD ROM
*1 3.5 Floppy
|
| Video: | Onboard |
| Sound: | Onboard |
| OS: | Windows 2003 Server
-Active Directory Domain Controller
-DNS
-DHCP
-File and printer server
-Terminal Services
|
Total cost, exactly $1271.00. That is what I am most proud of; the specs aren't all that great, but were you to buy a machine premade with comparable numbers (and RAID5 capable as this one is), you'd probably spend around 4-5 times that much. It really pays to do your own handiwork.
Alone in the closet that it once shared, now fully assembled and and ready to rock. It may not look like a gaming cabinet, but there is a museum of MAME and Neo-Geo roms in there, not to mention the entire Lavalit collection of OpenBOR modules. Maybe one of these days I will assemble a wireless cabinet to take advantage of it all.
You can also see more of me being a cheap a** in that the server utility desk is an old stereo cabinet. Hey, why not? Didn't cost a dime, nobody sees it with the door closed and it makes a neat little rack complete with slide out tray for the keyboard. My main printer is the same way (it's not in the picture). I use an Lexmark Optra E+ taken out of a local library's E-Waste rack. They were going to throw it away, and all it needed was a feeder wheel. 16 years old and still trucking. It's an ugly looking little cube of a printer, but it's laser, small, and free.
I do love free, but at this point, you can probably tell that for yourself
DC
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