The Webserver Box
This box used to have an Gigabyte Socket 7 430TX chipped board in it. I've now swapped that board with a cool new (to me) Soyo dual Socket 7 motherboard running a pair of classic Pentium 200MHz chips. I need to find some SIMMS for it, but the good news is that this will cache every byte of the 256Mb of SIMM EDO RAM I'm going to be sticking into it. Neato. This box will cease being a project box and will become my second production server. I'm going to be running the latest stable Linux kernel (probably a Red Hat distro), and it will be doing Sendmail, Apache as a backup to the present webserver, and DNS as a second DNS server to bring me into compliance with the DNS spec. I don't expect to need more performance than a pair of 200's will put out, but if I do, I may swap a pair of underclocked 233MHz MMX chips in to see if I get any performance gains. With 256Mb of RAM, it certainly should be able to saturate my DSL connection easy enough. I guess time will tell.
I expect to have it up and running in production mode by the end of May.
12/13/04
I don't quite know what to do with this box. I still think an old duallie is cool, but I just don't have time to mess with it much. It's stil configured as the old web server, but it hasn't been powered up in well over a year. I'd like to swap the I/O on it to something fast and use it as a network monitoring machine, but I don't think the processors are up to the job. It's also an AT box, and I've vowed to have all that stuff gone by the end of the year. I suspect I'll be getting rid of it soon.
3/03
We shut down this box due to the fact we really wanted to do some stuff with perl and php and this box just didn't have the grunt to get the back-end stuff done. That's OK though. We have a more than ready replacement.
1/10/02
This box is back up, but now it's the webserver. I'm running FreeBSD. I had to recompile the kernel right away to compile in the SMP (dual processor) bits. It seems to be running fine. I also added another pair of 64Mb SIMM modules so that now this box is maxed out at 256Mb of RAM. I also mounted new processor fans on top of the new Pentium 200MHz MMX chips. The processing power has gone up somewhat, but what's really gone up is how much RAM it still has to play with when it's functioning normally. I should be on-line with it as a web server by the end of January.
12/3/01
After being my SSH gateway for about 6 months, I've shut it down in order to add a couple of 200MHz Pentium MMX chips. Prices for these jobs have fallen so much that I could afford it on what I pay for parking in a day. I swapped the chips out and made a stab at installing BSD on it, but I was out of luck. I need to know a bit more than I do about the BSD kernel and BSD's SMP abilities. It ran nicely on Windows 2000 for about an hour, but I then scrubbed it and went to BSD. Win2k was only to get some benchmark numbers.
I'd be up and talking about how cool it is to be up and running yet another SMP box and yet another OS, but I've been struck with hardware problems. BSD isn't finding my USB mouse, and I think the serial ports on this motherboard are roached. I just can't get them to wake up. The real hardware problem came when I took a look inside the box while it was running and found that the two new Radio Schlock CPU fans I bought when I stuck this thing together have already burned out. That sucks ass. I don't think the CPUs really need them all that badly, but they were good insurance. Well, not so good insurance, but it was nice to have them while they worked. This box will be grounded until I learn more about BSD and SMP and until I can get some new processor fans. I hate cheap crap.
6/17/01
This box is now the proud owner of a pair of 64Mb 60us EDO SIMMS. It's promotion to web server is very close. It rips. It's nice. From a command line approach 128Mb of RAM doesn't feel all that much different from 24Mb, however, on the rare occasions I run X and fool around with that end of things, I can't even begin to tell you how much faster it works. I doubt I could have done anything else other than swap out the processors and motherboard with something PII or better that would have upped performance that much. It's quite astounding. I'm doing it all the right way with SCSI everything, a 7200rpm spool on the hdd, 10/100Mb card, hardware modem (for backup, of course) and even a USB mouse, but the RAM upgrade made this thing jump.
