Bernard’s Blog

This weekend I completed my new Xeon server build.  It has dual 2.66 Ghz Quad Core Xeons with 32 GB of RAM and two 300 GB 10,000 rpm drives in RAID 1 configuration.  I have an existing 1.8 TB RAID 10 that I’ll eventually migrate to this server.

Despite building many computers over the years, I don’t really enjoy doing it anymore.  I think it is that I get stressed about if it’s going to work or not.  There’s a lot of putting together required before the power can be applied, and until that time there’s no way of knowing if all the parts are okay and you’ve put them together in the right way.  If it doesn’t work you need to start taking things apart to find out the cause.  It really can be a pain.

The build, although time consuming was fairly easy.  I did need to get some power cable extensions for the power supply.  Also I needed to get a new case for the motherboard.  I was hoping to reuse an old case, and although the new board fit, the motherboard tray lacked the required CPU heat sink mounting holes.  The Xeon cooling system requires it to be screwed to the chassis through holes in the board.  I knew about this, and the old case has many mounting holes it in, but never really bothered to confirm that the holes were in the right position.  Turns out they were not which necessitated a quick trip to Fry’s to pick up a decent server case.

Here are some screen shots!

I added 64 GB as swap.  It used to be that you would make your swap partition size double that of the RAM installed.  With 32 GB RAM it seems a little ridiculous to have 64 GB of swap.  I’ll probably reduce it to 32 GB after doing some tests running multiple virtual machines.

Eight cores sitting idle, awesome!

One of my favorite folds is this octagonal box.  There are many ways to assemble the lid, each resulting in a different pattern in the center where the eight units meet.  It’s also possible to vary the depth of the base.  Sixteen sheets of square paper are required, eight for the lid and eight for the base.

This paper is very thick, so the box is quite strong.

For the lid on this box I used paper colored on both sides.  You can see the orange and light green elements which otherwise would have been white.

Can anyone spot the mistake in this last one?

I’m planning on building a new server in the coming weeks.  I’ve settled on a dual quad core Xeon system, I just need to choose between the new Nehalem architecture, or the Harpertown architecture.

The Nehalem performance is fantastic, but the CPUs, RAM etcetera are expensive.  For the same money I could get a Harpertown based system running at least 0.5 GHz faster and with double the RAM.  It would easily satisfy my meager requirements, and probably run cooler.

Seems the choice is clear…

I’m a bit slow, I just finished watching season two of the new Doctor Who. It was okay, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first season.  I find David Tennant’s Doctor annoying, and even Rose started to bother me.

Also I think the stories have become completely preposterous.  It’s more fantasy than science fiction now.

Still I have season 3 and 4 queued up in Netflix, perhaps it’ll get better…

I am exactly 2001 weeks old today!