Return To Geekness…
Thats right, I’m back :-). Whaaa haaa haaa *snort* *snort* . After installing cable for a year and a half working 75-95 hr weeks, its taken me 7 months to recover, but I’m now back to my geeky self. I’ve certainly got some time to make up! This brings my project list!
* Build A Dual Processor AMD Server
* Power Mod to fix 5v Limitations
* Overclock to 2.5 Ghz
* Install Linux (With NO GUI!! WHAA HAAA HAA)
* Setup Asterisk (Open Source PBX)
* Setup TMDA Spam Filter
* Divert mail from all domains to Server
* Return mail to said server upon completion
As a computer geek whose never delved much into Linux, this is going to be fun. I’ve finalley gotten myself over that basic level of understanding to be able to dive right in. Now I can’t believe the possibilities. My capital expenditures for computer projects are still limited, but the great thing about Open Source is this is not a problem. Monitary costs can be substituted for time, which is something I’ve had enough of as of late. Family always comes first, so I’m sure that these projects will be delayed more than anticipated, but in the meantime its full speed ahead!
First project, get this computer built and my server running. A long, long time ago, in a land far far away, I bought a Tyan S2460 dual-proccessor motherboard. This was in the days before I was married when I had great anticipation of putting it into a brand new system. That was well over 4 years ago, and fortunately this board is still of use. While technically the max processor it can handle is a 1900+, there have been quite a few documented cases of people running much, much more. My plan is to throw in two mobile 2600+ AMD’s, and overclock them to 2.5ghz. Unfortunately, if I’m going to pull all this power, I’m going to have to fix the 5v issue on this board. Apparently the brilliant people at Tyan decided to power all the PCI sockets, in addition to the AGP slot, and two proccessors from the same 5v lines. While the board will pull the juice it needs, it pulls a decent amount of amps over what the wires are rated for, causing meltdown.
To solve this, I’ll be following a fix I ran across online, soldering a few extra molexs to the back of the board. This will increase the number of possible paths to draw power from as a resultreducing the strain on any one given wire. While I’ve got the soldering iron out, I figured I mine as well do a regular power mod, increasing the power to my CPU’s and upping the mhz.
I’ll post more as this project progresses (and probably dig out the digital camera, posting a picture or two). As of now this is the plan.
Antec Super Lanboy Case, Antec 480 Watt TruePowerII Blue PSU, 2 2600+ Mobile AMD’s, four 4GB drives I have lying around (Unless fatwallet finds something cheap), and 2-3 Intel 587 Modems (for Asterisk). I’ll probably throw in a CD-Rom or two, and may pick up a DVD-RW if the price is right. I guess it all depends on what Fatwallet has running over the next few weeks!
August 31st, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Ok, so I can understand Linux with a good shell, but raw linux– you’d probably laugh at my first experiences with e-mail and unix! It was the only e-mail at college my freshman year, and I didn’t know how to leave unix and save. Let’s just say my dad got a lot of titles with no text. Hopefully you’ll do better than I.
August 31st, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Ah, LInux was the easy part. I can do software… not sure if should be touching any more hardware…but software I can do. Lets just say that when I was done with this project and I hit the power button… nothing happened ;-(. Since I never tested the motherboard before I began soddering, I can’t say conclusively that I killed it. However its extremely likely that I did. That motherboard was in the trash about a month ago after I verified it was dead.
Three months ago I was lucky enough to pick up a P4 board for free (long story). That board is now in the case with all the extras that was going to be in the other system. I’ve rebuilt the system several times over the last couple months but I now have a stripped-down version of Debian running on it. Instead of rebuilding boxes every time I want to fiddle with something new, I have VmWare server running on this box. Its great. When I want to fiddle with webdesign, I boot up my Virtual Web Server. When I want to fiddle with a mail server, I boot up my VmWare mail server. I even have a Windows 2003 Active Directory server in there (running a trial version).
I’ve gotten familiar enough with the Linux kernel now that I can navigate pretty well. I’m still nowhere near a Linux Guru, but I know where to start with pretty much anything I want to tackle right now…. LOL like sending e-mail from a command prompt, complete with message body