Nine years later, I buy an actual server
I've been running a home-brewed set of servers in my house ever since 1997, when working on the Chrome Project. Chrome ("fast and flashy") was Eric's and my big follow-on to DirectX, stuffing high performance multimedia into Internet Explorer 4.0. Sadly, it never really saw the light of day (although Eric slipped it out on MSN Access CDs when he took the MSN Access job). Anyway, back then the hot processor was the 300MHz Pentium II, and if you could buy one (which you couldn't as there was no supply), it cost $1,999.00. My Intel contact scored me FOUR, count 'em, FOUR of these bad boys, and being the generous soul I am, I kept three for myself and gave one to Eric. From those three, I built a desktop machine and a 2 processor server that I ran for years. I used it for managing internet access (128kbps ISDN until 2003, if you can believe it), file storage and printing (i.e., a server 
). When my first born server finally started coughing and wheezing, I replaced it with another home-brewed contraption (which for the life of me I can't remember the specs of), and most recently (in July of 2002 - going on 4 years ago), I built a monster of a server - dual 2ghz Xeon with 2 GB of RAM and a 750GB Raid 5 (w/hot spare) array with 8 125 gb drives on a 3Ware Escalade IDE RAID controller. The damned thing has 15 drive bays and was the size of a small planet. I upgraded this server to1.5 terabytes (8 250gb drives) in December of 2003.
Over the past two years, I took a couple of desktop machines, added a 3 bay 4 drive hot swap array and a 4 drive 3Ware Escalade IDE RAID controller and declared them servers as well. One is running Exchange 2000, and the other does nothing other than run a java program that simulates a replay TV device and serves up recorded kids shows. Along with my Vtrak 15200 iSCSI appliance with 4.8 terabytes of storage, my furnace room (where this all lives) sounds something like the inside of a jet engine and is burning something like 1500 watts of power.
As our life became more and more digital (110gb of pictures and mpeg videos taken from my digital Elph, along with terabytes of shows, mp3s, etc) I realized that I was pushing my luck relying on these power hungry home built dinosaurs that could fall over on any given Sunday. So I dedicated the rest of my tax return (the first part went to my gaming PC and 30" monitor, of course ) to a new server, built by professionals and actually supported. I had been waffling about buying it since Christmas, and finally pulled the trigger in the United lounge while waiting for my flight to Toronto a couple weeks back (34% off was enough to get my butt in gear).
And boy oh boy, what a server. For not a lot more than the home brewed server I built 4 years ago, our fancy new Dell PowerEdge 1850 has the following (all in a sweet 1U package, which is only 1.75 inches tall and 19 inches wide):
- 2 Dual Core 2.8GHz Xeon processors (with 2 2MB caches each)
- 8GB of DDR2 400Mhz RAM (8 is so much better than 2!)
- a PCI Express Dual 1GB Intel network card (for 1 port for network, one to connect to my Vtrak 15200)
- DVD/CD-RW drive
- Dual 146GB U320 10k RPM SCSI drives, in a RAID 1 configuration (finally I don't have to worry about boot drive failure)
- Perc4-SC RAID controller, with 128MB cache and battery backup for said cache
- Dual redundant power supplies
Whaa-Hoo! Thanks to my handy MSDN Universal subscription, I could install Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition (necessary to access the full 8GB of RAM) and Exchange 2003 Server without mortgaging my house. Pretty painless, all the drivers were supported, so no screwing around to get Windows booting. 8GB of RAM is pretty cool, and - get this - because there are dual Xeons each with dual cores and each core is hyperthreaded, Windows shows EIGHT processors. Truth be told, it will probably perform like around 3 or 3 1/2 processors, but it still 8 looks cool!
I had all kinds of trouble getting the Microsoft 2.01 iSCSI initiator to see my Vtrak 15200 (by all sorts, I mean it never did work). The older 1.06 version worked great, albeit on reboot, I lose all the directories I shared out - I think I can solve that problem by change some service start dependencies, I need to do some digging.
Exchange 2003 installed without a hiccup either, athough I got bitched at by both by the main install and the SP 1 upgrade that there were some "compatibility issues" with the version of Windows I was running - gotta love that, Exchange 2003 complaining about Windows Server 2003. But bitching aside (which in fairness, by SP2 MSFT managed to make Exchange 2003 not bitch about having compatibility issues with Windows 2003 Server), I could connect via Outlook just fine, so I am in the midst of backing up all my outlook data (8gb!!).
My next great adventure is to add Virtual Server 2005 so I can run Replay TV servers, get all the data transferred from my old server to the Vtrak array, and setup MirrorFolder to auto-backup my Vtrak to my new Buffalo TeraStations. Then I can take about 1000 watts of home-brewed servers offline at last - 9 years after my first home brewed server first saw the light of day.