VOGONS


First post, by luckybob

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As the self appointed king of all systems with two cpus. I am required by pride to also post MY dual socket 604 xeon setup. I take this machine offline for a few hours every 6 months or so to do a cleaning, that was this morning! This machine has been running 24/7 in my garage for probably 6 years now. I have used the same cpus since like 2008. It does the following tasks for me:

File server - I would use a dual P3 for these tasks, but the bandwidth I want from my raid 6 file server demands pci-e.
sandbox email/web/ftp server - because why not.
print and fax server - yes I do still send and receive the occasional fax, I can even print from my smart phone from the internets
Router - I separate all my vintage machines to a sub network. This lets me run things like BOOTP/PXE, IPX, netbeui, and appletalk with no regard to security.
Garage heater - its actually not very good at this
Backups - with tape!

Hardware as follows:

2x 3.8ghz netburst Irwindale xeons www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon% ... 00FA).html
2x 10 pound copper chunks with 60mm screamer fans (PWM saves the day)
8x 2gb ddr2-400 ecc/reg dims (16gb)
1x ATI rage XL pci card with EIGHT mb of vram
1x Supermicro X6DA8-G@ motherboards http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboar … 25/X6DA8-G2.cfm
1x HP Storageworks ultrium 960 tape backup drive https://h10057.www1.hp.com/ecomcat/hpcatalog/ … r/05/Q1539B.htm
1x Areca ARC1280ML 24-drive sata/sas raid controller with 2gb cache (recent upgrade) - http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcie341.htm
12x 1TB 2.5" DVR hard drives - https://www.toshiba.ca/productdetailpage.aspx?id=2147493672
3x 320gb DVR seagate drives (1 for boot, 2 for scratch area for tape)- http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard- … eline-hd/#specs
1x PCP&C 750W PSU - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16817703006
1x Lian-Li V-2100 Plus (mine is the older version without the corner fan) - http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-v2100-plus-ii/

First, the case. There are no words in in Entish, Elvisth, or the tongues of man to describe just how amazing this case is. I bought it new in 2005 and it has had a computer running inside its sound dampened sides ever since. I am not exaggerating this. As I type this, the 604 xeons are inside, and I have to pay attention in order to hear it run. Granted PWM fans help, but the 60mm cpu fans still can scream, and I dont hardly hear them.
g0XOKVEm.jpg

Oh, did I mention the door is sealed? Minor detail. It protects the fronts of the floppy/dvd and tape drives. Newer models of this case have vent holes, I'm not a fan.
5B72IOWm.jpg

Take off the side panel and you see I don't give a hot, wet dump about cable management. And for the record, this is before I cleaned it.
gHiAQtLm.jpg

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

Reply 1 of 4, by mrau

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2 gig bbw-cache? niche :>
i wonder if bigger is possible nowadays.. (sun hardware excluded)

Reply 2 of 4, by Tiger433

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Great machine, what OS you using there?

W7 "retro" PC: ASUS P8H77-V, Intel i3 3240, 8 GB DDR3 1333, HD6850, 2 x 500 GB HDD
Retro 98SE PC: MSI MS-6511, AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB RAM, ATI Rage 128, 80GB HDD
My Youtube channel

Reply 3 of 4, by luckybob

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Windows server 2003r2. I'm occasionally tempted to put linux on it, but im lazy.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

Reply 4 of 4, by Jade Falcon

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luckybob wrote:

Windows server 2003r2. I'm occasionally tempted to put linux on it, but im lazy.

It's it's main use is a server id put Redhat/cent OS 5 or 6 on it.

I'm not a big fan of Linux, but for servers it makes a lot of sense, certainly for old ones.
Linux is a grate server OS and tends to support older hardware a lot better then Windows.