Well I guess it's been a long time since I last posted, though a lot of planning (though not as much doing as I would like) has happened since then. So let's get started with one of my current dilemmas; my server situation...Owing to the recent heat wave and my unwillingness to air condition an uninsulated house my file server has been experiancing severe reliability issues. This is mainly due to the extreme tight clearances on it's motherboard, and thusly the inability to install better heat sinks on it's CPUs. After some deliberating I decided that it was time to mix it up...
First of all I finally moved my massive IBM Netfinity server over to my house (it honestly weighs over 100 lbs fully assembled!). I made the decision that this huge yet design-constrained system will be my PBX, the current PBX will become my file server, and the existing server will be retired from active use.
The IBM Netfinity 6000R is a corperate-class server (albeit one that's 10 years old). It is a high-reliability, high-stability, highly-overbuilt system featuring 4-way SMP (that's QUAD CPU!), interleaved Error-Correction memory and hardware RAID capabilities. However owing to it's design it is essentially limited to a single consumer-grade hard drive. And seeing as I can't afford to upgrade my storage disks I decided not to relegate this system to that role again. I primarialy purchased it to use as a game server, a role it filled eagerly, however I have a strong feeling that any LAN gaming requiring this robust of a server is probaly long since past... The way I figure I have the thing, I may as well put it to use. Even though it is extremely overpowered for my telephony needs the additional power this system has may be of use if I ever get ambitious...
The existing PBX system is a workstation-grade dual Pentium-III motherboard that I happened upon. This will become the file server, and after some memory shuffling (to maximize it's available memory) it should fill this role happily. And hopefully it will be less suseptible to the thermal issues of my current server...
Which is an ICP Electronics Single Board Computer with an expansion/multiplexing backplane. The entire dual Pentium-III motherboard featuring onboard video, sound, USB and dual Ethernet is crammed onto a single full-length PCI card (about a quarter of the size of a standard motherboard). The Expansion Backplane allows this single-board computer to function as a standard motherboard (and accept both PCI and long since defunct 16-bit ISA expansion cards). For a long time this server proved very satisfactory, however owing to the extremely cramped conditions on the system board, and a design flaw on Intel's part (the CPUs that this board accepts have an extremely small heatsink contact area). Because of this in order to improve CPU heat dissipation I'd either have to upgrade to copper-core heatsinks (and hope that they fit) or place gold (!) wafers between the CPU and the heat sink... Both of these options simply aren't worth the money!
As of the moment I have moved all of the telephony hardware from the old PBX into the IBM machine, but haven't done much else. Currently I am suffering from either a cold or mild smoke inhalation (from cooking over an open fire for over 15 hours over the course of the weekend) and only got two hours of sleep last night. I hope to accomplish more on this project later this week... Until then...
(P.S. I have more planned to post, I simply want to wait between posts to make sure none of it gets overlooked)
