To Serve[r] Man

Last weekend’s around the house task involved this stuff:

• AMD Athlon II X4 610e Propus 2.4GHz 45W 4-Core CPU
• PNY GeForce GT 430 (Fermi) 1GB Video Card
• G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB DDR3 Memory
• CORSAIR Pro Series 650W Modular Power Supply
• ASUS M4A87TD/USB3 AMD Motherboard
• Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6.0Gb HD
• 2 x Western Digital Caviar Black 1.5TB SATA 6.0Gb HDs
• ASUS SATA 24X DVD Burner
• Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound

All obtained from newegg.com – is there anywhere else?  I chose the 45w CPU because I wanted a machine that will stay cool without an aggressive cooler, and that I can leave on 24×7.

All of these components went into a 4U case that was running a really old rig that I had long intended as a home server but never really used.  It took longer to disassemble the old stuff than to put together the new – can’t beat SATA interfaces (vs ancient wide IDE cables) and modular power supplies.

Getting the box operational was the easy part; next came software.  I decided to go with Windows Server 2008 RC2 Enterprise Edition.  I did consider making this a Linux box, but I have a couple of ASP websites I run that I wanted to bring on to this new box, and using Windows will make file-sharing easier amongst the Salazar family’s various PCs.  And I have the license from my MSDN sub.  Anyway getting Windows up wasn’t too bad – the biggest hitch was in getting motherboard and RAID drivers on the box.  The installs that ASUS provides don’t recognize WinServer 2008 as a “valid” Windows version.  I managed to bypass the top-level ASUS installs and directly install some .msi’s.

Here’s the end-result … NFS volume BIGPLANET with 2.7 TBs of space.  It’s already storing my saved episodes of Samurai Jack … had to get the important stuff on there first.

Of course the hardest part of doing this sort of thing is figuring out what to name the box.  BIGPLANET gives you a clue … my scheme for naming home machines is to take names from the works of Jack Vance.  The winner for the new server name: DARSAI, home planet of the nefarious Lens Larque, one of the villains in Vance’s The Demon Princes.

Next steps: Checking out good backup software, installing SQL Server, and copying tons of TV shows.