A couple of months ago, I acquired through kapaza, 3 1U P4 capable Tyan barebone servers, which had some issues booting and running their gigabit network in windows. I spent € 50 each and jumped into resolving the issues. The two GS12 and the extra GS10 machines all take P4 s478 processors, of which I still had 2 laying around. The three servers all take standard DDR memory, the GS12 takes 4 bars, the GS10 takes only 2, respectively going to a maximum of 4GB and 2GB.
The cpu I had laying around went from one machine to the other, and it seemed the two GS12′s booted fine with it. Running an Ubuntu Server 7.10 on them, doing some networking stress-tests, made clear that it must have been a windows/driver issue, as the network cards both (both machines have 2 gigabit nic’s on-board) transported over 20GB back and forth overnight, without any error or dropped packet… Trying to get the machine’s to run windows and have networking enabled, proved to be some more problematic, but with some ‘standard’ intel drivers I managed to get it to work, with the occasionally needed reboot once in a while…
The GS10 seemed really dead, and trying to get it to live didn’t help. The LED stayed red when powering up… so I guess something BIOS-wyse went wrong… I instantly gave up on the GS10 and focused on getting the most out of the GS12′s.
I bought a Pentium 4 3.0GHz with HyperThreading on a 800MHz bus, and a couple of 1GB DDR Dimm’s, which I put in one machine. A 2 port SATA ‘software raid’ controller using a Silicon Image controller chip went in it too, hooking up 2 160GB drives (I prefer Western Digital Raid Edition) in a software Mirror setup (md0) were configured and the newest released Ubuntu 8.04 Server with the Long Term Support was installed on it.
After a few trials to export-import the debian database, which I will clear out later, but all databases were started and mysql was running! A couple of tests later, all my websites were up! Mission completed (99% that is, still need some solution for the debian system database), and the old P3 machine can finally retire, after having run for over 2 years now. Let’s hope the newly started P4 machine runs a little longer.
By the way, the second GS12 was sold this evening. I packed a 2.4GHz P4 FSB 800MHz with 512kb cache in it, put 4 256MB dimm’s in it, and added a 80GB IDE disk. The guy wanted a testing router/server/all-in-one machine that doesn’t take too much space. This machine was now sold for € 295, so all my costs of both the machines were nicely covered. That means, the machine that is serving you this page, didn’t actually cost me a single cent. I did a nice job, no?
