Sunday, July 09, 2006

19" Server - Hardware Build v0.1

After many weeks of procrastination, I finally pieced together my own 19" server that I intend to host my own applications on. I intended to use some high spec. hardware but opted to use some old pieces of kit that I had lying around my room, just to see how things go at first.

Any old pc box will do, but I bought my own 19" box from X-Case with 500watt power supply. The box is really heavy but bomb proof! Inside, I used an old WinFast K7S motherboard that supports an AMD Athlon XP Socket 462 FSB 400 processor. It has support for LAN and all the usual connections. This is about 3 years old. My first hurdle with this board was that I couldn't use my new 500watt P/S, because the power adapter doesn't fit the socket on the motherboard. So, instead I used my old 300watt P/S. I plugged in an old ATI graphics card and an additional 2 socket IDE Controller for when I decide to add more HDD. I'm only using a single Western Digital 40Gb HDD. I'm also only using 512Mb RAM. My motherboard only has 2 sockets for RAM so I could push this up to 2Gb, but that will have to wait. I've also attached a 3.5" Floppy and a 16X Emprex DVD RW drive. The box comes prepared with 2 small intake fans and one large extractor fan, plus all the regular cables that attach to the motherboard. Unfortunately, because my board is so old; I can't attach my LAN Led cable which indicates whether my LAN is UP or DOWN, nor can I attach one of the intake fans because there aren't any supplied pins. Looks like I might be doing an upgrade in the not too distant future!

That's it for now. I'm going to be using a Linux distro for the O/S, CentOS maybe?

Here are some pics of the box...enjoy!


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