The Rackmount and Servers Thread

[willawake]

heres some pics from today, mixed up with some old pics. i realise it aint much but i am pretty proud of getting this system approved by accounting. Rackmount costs more but it doesnt have to cost too much more and it is just great to have everything in one location and secure.



cables were messed up last time i posted. i cleaned them up a bit.

At the top is a panduit modular 24 port patch panel. you can read more about that here http://www.techmati.com/articles/lan/index.htm it is a joy to work with and easy to add more ports when needed, you fix them outside the panel and just snap one in. no need to disturb anything.

Below that is a cable tidy which has the same clips around the back which are very useful. a future mod might be to bolt a piece of black acrylic on the front to hide things.

Then below that it a cisco 2950t switch which has 24 10/100 ports and 2 gigabit ports. it is an excellent switch with nichicon caps. needs some small configuration which you do via IOS so lots of head scratching over syntax. can get some reports out of it which are really useful, i found some cards were set to half duplex from those reports.

below that you have a levelone kvm which has 4 ports. it has single kvm cables for each server so no mess and the signal is good. you just press the big buttons to change between each server or use keystroke commands. only objectionable part about that kvm is that it has a wall wart psu. yuck!

then on the shelf there is a zyxel prestige adsl router and behind that the splitter.

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount

here is what it looks like when one of those goofy 4u cases gets pulled out on the rails for servicing. that is the mailserver actually, its just a pc in a server case. runs win2k server and mdaemon mailserver which absolutely rocks as an imap mail solution. they call it the "exchange killer". its got its own webserver for serving up attachments or webmail. can even run it on a non server windows that way.

[dood]

Re: My Rackmount

Nice! I've never seen the 4u's on rails like that. For all ours, we just pull them all the way out of the rack and slap 'em on the table to work on 'em.

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount

one of the reasons i wanted to pull the mailserver was to see how these TAICON caps were going. they look ok.

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount

Nice! I've never seen the 4u's on rails like that.

the rails are from King Slide, taiwan. i paid kinda much for them. if you see those white bars below the rails, they make a shelf for the 4Us. they were cheap but i couldnt work like that so now they are just below the 4Us in case the rails fail, they wont but i dont have anywhere else to keep them.

[Topcat]

Re: My Rackmount

I have an intel server board for dual tualatin-s CPU's that is full of taicon caps. it's been running non stop over a year, solid as a rock running Fedora Linux with the taicons, so I can't complain. The board was used when I got it, so I don't know how long it ran before I got it, but it's had a hard life here, running all the time. How's yours holding up? How long running? I hope I dont need to recap mine, its FULL of caps!

edit
NICE rack BTW! Well done!
/edit

[dood]

Re: My Rackmount

This was my rack at our old house... Didn't house much, but it looked cool...





I got the rack for free, so felt that I should use it. Unfortunately, it's sitting up in our barn now because I don't have room in the new house to get it all set up. Maybe when I move out...

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount

here's the APCs. you can read more about them here http://www.techmati.com/reviews/SUA1000RMI2U/index.htm 1000VAs are a good price. they make a great sound when you turn them on and they kick in. one is for the mailserver and the other stuff. the other is for the fileserver which is connected via apcupsd a great piece of software. they have smart monitoring across the lan so you can see graphs of the voltage and events also test them remotely.

[dood]

Re: My Rackmount

We have two of the SmartUPS 1500's in our rack at the school. I'll have to get some shots of them. I agree... a great noise!

[Topcat]

Re: My Rackmount

I need new UPS's............ Mine are very old and the batteries are very dead. they're useless as tits on a boar, anytime the power goes out, the servers go out with it.... The only thing they're good for anymore is surge protection, which is why I haven't removed them.

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount

How's yours holding up? How long running? I hope I dont need to recap mine, its FULL of caps!

its good to know you had good experience with the taicons so far. i thought you sold that intel server board to kc8? i have no idea how long that board was running, it used to be a workstation for a while before it had bad elixir ram and was recalled and ended up where it is now. as a mailserver it has been running for over a year 24/7 no probs except i went through about 3 new hdds before i got that fortron and sorted out the cooling.

I need new UPS's............ Mine are very old and the batteries are very dead.

APC smart-ups are THE units if you want to buy new. otherwise batteries are cheap if you wanna replace.

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount

Unfortunately, it's sitting up in our barn now because I don't have room in the new house to get it all set up.

thats a pity, it looks great. if your 3com starts fizzing then check for badcaps.

[Rainbow]

Re: My Rackmount

I've seen a 1995 monitor full of Taicons and they were OK.

[dood]

Re: My Rackmount

thats a pity, it looks great. if your 3com starts fizzing then check for badcaps.

Don't use the 3com anymore... found out it was a 10/100 HUB, and was really hurting my network performance. Plus, the fans were loud.

I need to get some shots of our racks at work. We have two APC NetShelters linked together...

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount

here is the fan mod for the 4U. you can see the air vents on the case, behind that are 2 powerful adda fans but they do nothing for the hdds which are on the right side of the case.





God bless my shitty dremeling



so basically behind the fan you have 2x5.25 bays available below the cdrom, so you install 2 hdds in those locations and remove the bay covers (photo doesnt show them removed) then it blows air over the hdds and to the psu.

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount



here is the rails installation for the APCs. it is just like a shelf. they are incredibly heavy

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount

here is the cisco





nice nichicon PL

[willawake]

Re: My Rackmount



and the fileserver HP DL380 G4 running RHEL 4.
more pics here http://www.techmati.com/reviews/dl380g4/index.htm
a really great server indeed. can pick one up for $1600 single proc 1gb no hdds if you search around.

[Per Hansson]

Re: My Rackmount

I need new UPS's............ Mine are very old and the batteries are very dead. they're useless as tits on a boar, anytime the power goes out, the servers go out with it.... The only thing they're good for anymore is surge protection, which is why I haven't removed them.

Just a tip, restart you comp in DOS or BIOS or whatever where it does not matter that it suddenly shutsdown...

Then remove the comm cable between the UPS and server, and then the powercable (keeping in mind that you should somehow still provide grounding)

This will make the UPS recalibrate the runtime of the batteries, it might just be it's microprocessor that thinks they are bad... Had this happen to an old APC Smart-UPS 700 UPS... bought new cheap replacement batteris, and it still would not run... So I thought maybe it did not like those batteries... So I bought APC originals for like 100$ and then it did not work either... That was when I found out about that recalibration trick...

[Rainbow]

Re: My Rackmount

The more intelligent UPSs should have a software command that can do it.