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So I got these guys out of cold storage finally... They've sat there since my rough trip back from Florida several years ago. Boy, I tell ya... these things aren't meant to be trucked around the country, but they were. I took 'em with me everywhere.
Obviously they don't look perfect. They once did... I still have some parts to go find. Two servers were DOA when I finally got everything set up. One had a bad PSU, and the other had a deprecated RAID array. Luckily there wasn't anything too valuable on the RAID set, and I had an extra server carcass laying around, so I threw a new PSU in the other one... voila! Had them both up and running perfectly in ten minutes. I had to re-IP all my devices to conform with the new addressing standard, so that meant static IP's outside the DHCP assignment range for all the servers, switches, wireless routers, printers, etc. It was a lot of work and it took me all day to get everything working, patched, re-IPed, updated, troubleshot, etc. She's running pretty smooth right now. ...and all off of a neighbor's wifi box. lmao
This thing puts out a hella lot of heat, and the sound it makes is impressive. It's not like your normal computer. This thing is basically a jet engine!
Obviously they don't look perfect. They once did... I still have some parts to go find. Two servers were DOA when I finally got everything set up. One had a bad PSU, and the other had a deprecated RAID array. Luckily there wasn't anything too valuable on the RAID set, and I had an extra server carcass laying around, so I threw a new PSU in the other one... voila! Had them both up and running perfectly in ten minutes. I had to re-IP all my devices to conform with the new addressing standard, so that meant static IP's outside the DHCP assignment range for all the servers, switches, wireless routers, printers, etc. It was a lot of work and it took me all day to get everything working, patched, re-IPed, updated, troubleshot, etc. She's running pretty smooth right now. ...and all off of a neighbor's wifi box. lmao
This thing puts out a hella lot of heat, and the sound it makes is impressive. It's not like your normal computer. This thing is basically a jet engine!
Category Photography / Miscellaneous
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 500 x 667px
File Size 365.4 kB
They're kinda old... and I obtained them used, so don't expect anything impressive anymore.
I have eight working units out of the nine at the moment. They're all xserves with dual processors. I have first gens, second gens, and third gens, so 1.0 GHz, 1.33 GHz, and 2.33 GHz respectively. I have about 6 TB in the rack alone, which was for its time pretty impressive, and not bad for being built out of scrap and used hard drives. Each unit has anywhere from 1 GB to 4 GB of RAM, depending on importance.
I have eight working units out of the nine at the moment. They're all xserves with dual processors. I have first gens, second gens, and third gens, so 1.0 GHz, 1.33 GHz, and 2.33 GHz respectively. I have about 6 TB in the rack alone, which was for its time pretty impressive, and not bad for being built out of scrap and used hard drives. Each unit has anywhere from 1 GB to 4 GB of RAM, depending on importance.
Might I ask why you are trying to host something off of a (more than likely) poor quality residential network? Why not contact your ISP for a hosting network to run through. (It would have much faster out-speed, I can guarantee that.) And what ARE you trying to host that requires such an array?
I tend to be a fan of the hardware, so I collect 'em. I use them mainly for data storage these days (I'm a data whore lol). At one time IDE hard drives were pretty damn easy to come by, so I used to collect as many as I could find and throw 'em in the ADM's for use in RAID arrays. I also used to use them as renderfarm nodes, so they're mainly about storage and processing. I've never used them for webservers and never intend to. A lot of people forget that hardware like this is valuable for more than that.
Plus not paying the extra 30-40 bucks a month for internet is nice. eue
Plus not paying the extra 30-40 bucks a month for internet is nice. eue
They actually did it twice. The first time was in the 90's, and their servers were awful. They weren't even running Mac OS. They were a nightmare to configure and the hardware wasn't great either. Then in 2001 or 2002, they re-entered the server market with the xserve and OS X server. The hardware was very capable this time around, and the software was pretty robust. From what I've seen, it was never really used to its full potential in commercial deployment. PLUS you didn't have to pay a licensing fee PER SERVER, which is how Microsoft makes such huge revenues. ...then Apple had to make the dumbest choice ever and drop their professional server line and piss off a bunch of IT departments who were counting on Apple to provide them with next generation technology. Now they have to go out and buy windows again, unless they want to pay a programmer to futz around with linux.
Was it really? I remember I had configured some xserves and pimped them for max specs when they were still selling them, and the total came to around $8,000 a pop. Sun systems can be many times more than that, depending on what you buy.
And yeah, I know most companies use virtual environments nowadays. One physical server chassis will house many more servers inside it. I never needed to do that kinda thing... I use them as file servers mostly.
The servers I have are pretty nice. Yeah, components fry from time to time, but they're old, and that's to be expected. It doesn't happen very often. No, they are not ideal for housing virtual servers. For the amount of abuse they've been through, they're stellar performers. I know IDE technology is archaic, and so are RISC processors, but it works for me! Old parts mean they're easy to find in bulk quantity for little to no cost. I'm not an IT admin with $600,000 to budget, so... I built this mainframe with no money at all. IT departments do throw 'em out occasionally... and that's usually how I wind up with them. One man's trash is another's treasure!
And yeah, I know most companies use virtual environments nowadays. One physical server chassis will house many more servers inside it. I never needed to do that kinda thing... I use them as file servers mostly.
The servers I have are pretty nice. Yeah, components fry from time to time, but they're old, and that's to be expected. It doesn't happen very often. No, they are not ideal for housing virtual servers. For the amount of abuse they've been through, they're stellar performers. I know IDE technology is archaic, and so are RISC processors, but it works for me! Old parts mean they're easy to find in bulk quantity for little to no cost. I'm not an IT admin with $600,000 to budget, so... I built this mainframe with no money at all. IT departments do throw 'em out occasionally... and that's usually how I wind up with them. One man's trash is another's treasure!
nice
I've been hauling a 16-core rig with two processors and 24 G ram around for a few years but the bloody thing keeps dying from bad-hardware disease and then magically working again with no explanation.
Something inherent in the architecture though makes it run slower than my newer 8-core single-processor desktop. Still, you can't beat having that ram available when you need it.
This render-farm stuff, Are you rendering frames or do you break images up into chunks?
I've been hauling a 16-core rig with two processors and 24 G ram around for a few years but the bloody thing keeps dying from bad-hardware disease and then magically working again with no explanation.
Something inherent in the architecture though makes it run slower than my newer 8-core single-processor desktop. Still, you can't beat having that ram available when you need it.
This render-farm stuff, Are you rendering frames or do you break images up into chunks?
I never could get bucket rendering to work properly with the software I had at the time. I did manage to render frames individually on each server though!
Most servers are all about RAM, less about processing these days. Most web applications and virtual server environments require vast amounts of RAM. You could probably run a decent minecraft server off of that though! Just out of curiosity, what kind of server were you running? Was it a dell by chance? ...or was it a build-your-own?
Most servers are all about RAM, less about processing these days. Most web applications and virtual server environments require vast amounts of RAM. You could probably run a decent minecraft server off of that though! Just out of curiosity, what kind of server were you running? Was it a dell by chance? ...or was it a build-your-own?
Oh yeah, I've run some serious minecraft stuff on their. Both vanilla and bukkit. It's funny when people try to crash it, because they crash their clients but the server usually doesn't blink at all.
It's a custom build off an ASUS motherboard. A large number of the boards of that model come DOA and the wholes aren't drilled in the standard places for that size, so meh. When I first assembled it, I couldn't get it to work. Then I had to leave for several months and when I came back it magically worked. Went on for ~2 or 3 years then started resetting itself like a PSU problem, but with no PSU problem. I let it sit for a few months and then fiddled with it a bit and it 'seems' to be ok.
Nauseating if you pay out the nose for something but can't figure out what's wrong. :/
It's a custom build off an ASUS motherboard. A large number of the boards of that model come DOA and the wholes aren't drilled in the standard places for that size, so meh. When I first assembled it, I couldn't get it to work. Then I had to leave for several months and when I came back it magically worked. Went on for ~2 or 3 years then started resetting itself like a PSU problem, but with no PSU problem. I let it sit for a few months and then fiddled with it a bit and it 'seems' to be ok.
Nauseating if you pay out the nose for something but can't figure out what's wrong. :/
That DOES sound a lot like a PSU issue. Have you tried replacing it? Might not be the mobo at all. Does it fire when you turn it on? Or do you get nada? If it fires, but doesn't get to BIOS, that could be mobo, and if it gets past that, but not the boot sequence, it could be anything from hard drive to corrupt PRAM.
yeah, I ruled out psu by trying a few different ones.
It would just randomly reset like somebody had pushed the reset button at random times. Sometimes before leaving bios, sometimes after running for 5 minutes.
Sometimes it would get stuck in a little reset loop like a metronome, ticking every 2 seconds.
What's really creepy is that my old desktop died of the same symptoms. Maybe the dust here is made of metal. :-P
It would just randomly reset like somebody had pushed the reset button at random times. Sometimes before leaving bios, sometimes after running for 5 minutes.
Sometimes it would get stuck in a little reset loop like a metronome, ticking every 2 seconds.
What's really creepy is that my old desktop died of the same symptoms. Maybe the dust here is made of metal. :-P
You MIGHT want to check your RAM. May sound crazy, but with a system that's got RAM like that, who knows. A bad stick could be throwing it off irregularly. The only other thing would maybe be the motherboard/CPU itself. Who knows, maybe it took a surge hit or something. But I'd try shuffling your RAM around and see if it makes any difference, just for yucks.
Haha, eyup! Works for me!
I have a real rack in my parents' garage, but I was never able to finish painting it. And I have to get the rest of the rack hardware to hang the servers in the rack itself, seeing as a lot of these were scrap finds, and didn't come with their rack hardware. I have maybe six sets and nine xserves. :/
I have a real rack in my parents' garage, but I was never able to finish painting it. And I have to get the rest of the rack hardware to hang the servers in the rack itself, seeing as a lot of these were scrap finds, and didn't come with their rack hardware. I have maybe six sets and nine xserves. :/
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