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

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

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 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.