~ / pjvenda / site info / host hardware / October 2007

About this ~~upgrade~~ downgrade
Detailed specs

About this upgrade

As you might have figured already, I moved from Portugal to the UK recently to live and work there. Causes aside, one of the consequences was that my server (this one) had to stay behind for a number of reasons along the lines of:

no internet connection in the UK at the time of the move;
no way of knowing when I would have my own internet connection, or if it was any good;
no time to move the contents to some cheap hosting;
the *empty* server box alone weighs only 18Kg and has a modest volume of 620mm x 220mm x 425mm (that's 24.4" x 8.7" x 16.7" in inches). That's equivalent to "silly big"; (Don't believe me? Check the datasheet here: Chenbro SR107 chassis)
could not disconnect it and have it shipped because I had no idea of the price and it would have to stay disconnected for some time;
could not forget it and buy a new server in parts because I have already invested some money on it: chassis, power supply and disks.

So for some months, I left the server at home (the old one, in Portugal) and leeched my old internet connection until I got things stabilised on this side of the channel.

Meanwhile, I got a good internet connection (which I should advertise: newnet) and my boss gave me an old computer after a small office cleanup. So I assembled a temporary staging server while I found a way to safely ship the server from Portugal to England.

Serious downgrade - It's a Pentium IV with about 1GB of DDR (non-ECC) RAM (looks better, so far) but with a 40GB disk only - no RAID. All in a claustrophobic chassis with an 80s power supply with god-knows how much usage and wear.

"Server" fitted.

No matter, I moved the web and email service here and disconnected my server from Portugal. All is working well and this website is being served from the UK for some time now. Just for fun, I made sure I had 0 downtime for the transition - courtesy of DNS services.

So this crammed and seriously unreliable server looks like the following:

Well, it worked.

Detailed specs

Case	Unknown Low end workstation case. Given. I haven't been able to bring my Chenbro SR107 from Portugal.
Power Supply	Casecom 350W We all know the kind. Cheap, common, noisy, not as powerful as specced, etc. All bad things for a server.
Motherboard	Acer MS06702 ZIF Socket 478 for Pentium IV processors up to 3600 MHz Four memory slots, each supporting up to 1GB SDRAM DDR400 Integrated IDE controller Intel 82801/ER (ICH5/ICH5R). Supports up to four IDE devices Integrated SATA controller Intel 82801 (ICH5). Supports up to two SATA-150 devices Integrated graphics controller Intel 82865G Integrated ethernet controller Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5705 Gigabit 10/100/1000 Mbps
CPU	One Socket 478 2.60 GHz Intel Pentium IV Northwood FSB 100 MHz, multiplier 26x. Core voltage of 1.5V.
Memory	4 x 256MB DDR PC2100 (DDR266) non registered SDRAM sticks
IDE Controllers	Onboard Intel 82801E/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) ATA133 IDE controller 40GB Western Digital hard drive Onboard Intel 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller nothing attached
Hard Drives	40 GB ATA100 Western Digital WD400EB-00CPF0
Operating System	Gentoo Linux 2.6 Gentoo is a great linux distribution for servers. The excellent port of the FreeBSD "ports collection" system featured in Gentoo, makes package and dependency management one of the most flexible linux distros ever for server environments. Since every software package is installed from the sources (including of course its dependencies), full system upgrades don't exist, and that's a Good Thing(TM).
Network	onboard Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5705 10/100/1000 Mbps network card for Internet uplink.
User interface	ssh or serial console (hand-made serial cable + Belkin F5U103 USB-Serial converter.

Server state since October 2007

Contents

About this upgrade

Detailed specs