Unexpected new server

| Stephen | Consumer, House, Observations.

Now that the Shuttle system appears unsalvagable—no activity, even with a nice fresh BIOS chip—I suppose I should record the emergency server rebuild from a few weeks ago. On Saturday, Dina noticed she wasn’t getting any email. We had houseguests, so I didn’t slip out to Central Computer until Sunday, with a plan to wrap a new system around the old disks. I ultimately ended up with

  • Asus A8V Deluxe
  • AMD Athlon 64 3000+
  • 1 GB
  • Intel PRO/1000 GT [32-bit drivers from Intel for now]
  • ATI PCI graphics card
  • 2 × Western Digital 120GB drives

all in a CoolerMaster <a href=“http://www.coolermaster.com/index.php?LT=english&#038;Language_s=2&#038;url_place=product&#038;p_serial=CAC-T05&#038;other_title=0"

Centurion 5 case, and which is now running Solaris 10. The motherboard works well, although I’m only using the IDE controllers and none of the SATA or RAID functionality. (I also couldn’t match a driver to the onboard Gigabit Marvell Ethernet.)

Like any project at our place now, willing helpers materialize, tools in hand, even for a no-tools case: Putting the system together

I’ve built enough systems now that we shortly were ready for action, and blueslugs.com and highmaintenancemom.com were back: Server ready for action.

cooler lives in the office closet, which it shares with the UPS which selflessly filters PG&E’s rot gut, leaving only nicely distilled power: Server in its operating location.

(Without the Shuttle as a new desktop, I’m deciding between building another A8V-based system in a CoolerMaster Cavalier 4, or buying an Ultra 20.)

[T: Solaris]