So long and thanks for all the processor cycles!

So it has finally happened. What you say? My old server that I was using for everything here at home, has finally been replaced. No it didn’t break or fail in some way. After 5 years of good dedicated service (4.5 of which were trouble free), it was just time to move on to another box. Of course this had nothing to do with the fact that for this old Dual P4-Class Xeon box, upgrading the RAM from one gig to at least two gigs would cost me at least a thousand dollars. RDRAM ain’t cheap nowadays. Can’t say I’m surprised given how bad it bombed in the long run.

Nonetheless, I replaced my expensive dual processor box (built before the point Dual Cores made SMP affordable) with a $370 machine that I picked up at Circuit City as a open box buy. The machine is an HP Pavilion A6200N. For the google-deficient, it has 2 gigs of RAM, a dual core AMD x2 5000+ processor, 320 gig SATA2 disk and integrated Geforce 6150 graphics. Since this box will be filling a server role, the graphics meant little to me in the long run. Though there is a PCI-Express slot available to allow for a dedicated hardware upgrade, though I doubt the internal PSU could support any of the monster cards on the market nowadays. The motherboard uses an Nforce 430 chipset and appears to have a VIA chip on it for some function or another. Anybody who knows me, knows my hatred of VIA. However since VIA has been out of the AMD/Intel chipset business for awhile I presume this particular chip is the USB controller or something. Nonetheless, I found that for an additional $100 I could order two 2 gigabytes DDR2-5200 RAM sticks to shove into the things remaining open memory slots to take the total up to 6 gigabytes of memory. Not too bad for such a cheap computer.

Since I’m pretty much done building boxes, this box really drew me in. And when Circuit City says open box special, they aren’t kidding. There was no box, no manuals, no discs, no cables no nothing. They offered a keyboard and mouse but I declined (which I probably should’ve taken even though I already have those things - but the last thing I need is more junk). I just carried the actual computer right out of the store after paying. Now after setting it up and using it, I couldn’t be more impressed. Beyond a few issues getting my modded Linksys WRT54G wireless router with the DD-WRT firmware upgrade installed to recognize the fact that I plugged an ethernet cable from the new machine into it (which required a reboot of the router), all has been well.

I transitioned off my old box which had Ubuntu Linux as the primary OS, onto this new box which is using Windows 2003 Server x64 as its primary OS. I needed to go 64 bit to properly make all of this memory I have coming available to the OS in question as anything above three gigs in a Windows 32 bit environment begins to run into the Virtual Addressing Wall (which depending upon your devices can vary but a discussion of which is far beyond the scope of this composition). Also I switched back to Windows because the one thing I needed Linux for, I’m still using Linux for. My internal IMAP, getmail and postfix installation that I use to provide a centralized mail repository that I can hit from any OS and IMAP capable email client. I now have transitioned that setup into an Ubuntu Linux Server virtual machine that is hosted on the new server using the free version of VMWare Server.

For everything else I need the server for, Windows simply does a better job. Samba in Linux did alright with the file-sharing and printer-sharing, but it was finicky at best. It was also lacking on the performance as well as the security front compared to just hosting these things on a Windows Server. Not to mention that using Microsoft’s Terminal Services for remote control is so much nicer than dealing with FreeNX on the Linux side. FreeNX works just well enough to keep it, but has nagging problems that will plague you for as long as you use it. For instance, when connecting from multiple OSes to the same remote session, it tends to get the keymaps mixed up eventually. The only way to resolve this is to terminate the remote session by logging it out and then starting a new session. A few weeks later, rinse and repeat. I’ll miss sftp and ssh though. I’m on the lookout for a decent sftp server for Windows, though ssh as a remote command prompt serves far less of a useful purpose in a Windows environment.

Anyway - it is amazing how far cheap hardware has come in five years. Everything I wanted I got for less than $500 after taxes. That either means my standards are low given that I had the same server for five years (that cost me $4000+ to build) or that the hardware business is even more competitive. Probably a combination of both, eh?