got a server...

[shovenose]

IBM 1U, Dual dual-thread Xeon Processors, 6GB RAM, dual 160gb HDD in raid,.dual redundant power supplies, overall quite nice!
Got it for $160.
Good or no?

[ratdude747]

Re: got a server...

if it is a 1u, and it cools well, not bad. have a rack for that?

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

Nope
It cools a little TOO well...
I'll upload a video in a bit, you'll see what I mean xD

Anybody have a recommendation for a place to colo it for not too much $$$? thanks

[c_hegge]

Re: got a server...

Does it sound like my PSU load tester?

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIYDt...zU5ZVdq_wWswk7

[joshnz]

Re: got a server...

Indeed it is loud.

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

The verdict= I slept longer so it isn't keeping me awake. Maybe my mom will let me leave it on in the closet lol.

[mariushm]

Re: got a server...

It will hurt your ears in the long term, you might get tinnitus

Don't sleep with it running, it's not worth it.

At the same time, it's not really worth colocating it somwhere, it would cost you at least 50$ a month when you can rent for 60-70$ a month a server twice as powerful as that.

Try building a small rack for it out of some wood - it should be relatively cheap, much cheaper than a metal rack anyway. Then, maybe leave it running in the garage or your cellar or balcony or whatever extra room you have.

The alternative would be for you to try and find some low noise 1U coolers - the ones it currently has are designed for datacenter use, high rpm, noisy, because the servers are racked and noise doesn't matter. In rack, they just have to guarantee air flow.
I feel though that it will be more expensive than it's worth to get some quality low noise fans. I this case, it might be cheaper to get a 2U case and move everything in it and use low noise 80mm fans.

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

It will hurt your ears in the long term, you might get tinnitus

Don't sleep with it running, it's not worth it.

At the same time, it's not really worth colocating it somwhere, it would cost you at least 50$ a month when you can rent for 60-70$ a month a server twice as powerful as that.

Try building a small rack for it out of some wood - it should be relatively cheap, much cheaper than a metal rack anyway. Then, maybe leave it running in the garage or your cellar or balcony or whatever extra room you have.

The alternative would be for you to try and find some low noise 1U coolers - the ones it currently has are designed for datacenter use, high rpm, noisy, because the servers are racked and noise doesn't matter. In rack, they just have to guarantee air flow.
I feel though that it will be more expensive than it's worth to get some quality low noise fans. I this case, it might be cheaper to get a 2U case and move everything in it and use low noise 80mm fans.

I doubt it's a standard motherboard/case assembly. I think it's IBM proprietary...
Keep in mind that I spend a lot of time at school, work, or elsewhere and I'm really only at home in the evenings and when sleeping.

Is it bad for health? or what?
Thanks

Oh and: how do I make a directory writable in Linux? When I try to upload a file to the /var/backup/ directory on my server using WinSCP or even FileZilla it says I don't have permission. Setting the folder to 777 permissions using FileZilla didn't help.
Thanks!

[ratdude747]

Re: got a server...

the easy/noob way would be to hook it to a monitor and boot a ubuntu live disc and at the terminal run "sudo nautilus". once there, find the folder and set the permissions via folder properties.

there is a command line way as well, but i cannot remember it...

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

I did that in FileZilla but it says access denied when I try to set the permissions?

I'm gonna try chmod command
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod

[mariushm]

Re: got a server...

I doubt it's a standard motherboard/case assembly. I think it's IBM proprietary...
Keep in mind that I spend a lot of time at school, work, or elsewhere and I'm really only at home in the evenings and when sleeping.

Is it bad for health? or what?

Yes, you're probably right. The motherboard may be standard SSI EEB or CEB format for which you're gonna find cases from about 60$ and up, but the power supplies may be mounted a bit weirdly in that case.

As for sound, it's gonna damage your ears whether you sleep or not - your ears are not going to sleep, that's why when someone shouts in your room you wake up. So your ears will be constantly subjected to that buzzing and humming, which is really bad, even though it doesn't seem like much.

As for sleeping, yeah.. length of sleep is not really a proof it doesn't bother you...you may have slept longer but it's not a "quality" sleep... would be worth to try filming yourself throughout the night... I'm sure you'd be surprised.

I can tell you for sure that since I made my computer relatively silent (large low speed fan on cpu and hard drives, passively cooled video card and passive psu at low load, when idle) I sleep much better.

anyway... back to questions...

chmod is gonna work...

sudo can be run only from console, not from filezilla... the daemon (ftp server software) runs as "nobody" or some other user with no priviledges, so it can't elevate itself with sudo to a "root" user or another user that has permissions to change folder properties.

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

So SSH would work?

I'll shut it down at night, then. But... that leaves two questions:
1. How do I make it so that even when the server is shut down the website says something really basic like "Sorry, we're closed, please try again during business hours..."
2. Is it bad for these HP server hard drives to be powered on/off every day? I'm assuming they're designed to stay on 24/7...

Thanks mariushm

[mariushm]

Re: got a server...

Yeah, ssh will do just fine.



1.

You can't ... easily.

Basically, you could setup Varnish or some other reverse proxy on another machine.

People would access this machine from the Internet and Varnish would then connect to the IBM server and cache the requests and so on. If the IBM is down, it can return some error message.

Other things some people use are to have the dns server monitoring machines and announce several ips and when a server is down, they pull the ip out of the reply.

With a 30s-1minute timeout for dns entries, dns servers would keep contacting your dns server often and your dns server would have the chance to respond with the ip of another machine when the IBM server is turned off. This other machine would just say "sorry, we're down now"

2.
It's bad for any computer part to turn off and on but an on-off cycle of half a day wouldn't hurt them much.

I feel you really have a server you don't need now. Everything you would do with it you could really do with a regular computer that you can make silent. I know you also have two or three other servers/computers lying around and doing various stuff (i think you had a minecraft server, a mysql one etc)

I would seriously consider selling the three and just get a cheap system with a 2500k for 200$ and a 70$ motherboard, you would replace all three and have everything relatively silent.

replaced hp with ibm... not sure why i wrote hp either.

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

Yeah, ssh will do just fine.



1.

You can't ... easily.

Basically, you could setup Varnish or some other reverse proxy on another machine.

People would access this machine from the Internet and Varnish would then connect to the HP server and cache the requests and so on. If the HP is down, it can return some error message.

Other things some people use are to have the dns server monitoring machines and announce several ips and when a server is down, they pull the ip out of the reply.

With a 30s-1minute timeout for dns entries, dns servers would keep contacting your dns server often and your dns server would have the chance to respond with the ip of another machine when the hp server is turned off. This other machine would just say "sorry, we're down now"

2.
It's bad for any computer part to turn off and on but an on-off cycle of half a day wouldn't hurt them much.

I feel you really have a server you don't need now. Everything you would do with it you could really do with a regular computer that you can make silent. I know you also have two or three other servers/computers lying around and doing various stuff (i think you had a minecraft server, a mysql one etc)

I would seriously consider selling the three and just get a cheap system with a 2500k for 200$ and a 70$ motherboard, you would replace all three and have everything relatively silent.

My Minecraft server isn't crazy noisy like my IBM one (Not sure where you got the idea I have an HP), it's a custom built AMD Dual core in a cheapo Rosewill case... It'll have to run on a seperate server anyway, that's why I think the failover thing would be possible. Because I'm going to have 2 servers running at once anyway

[mariushm]

Re: got a server...

Why do you really have to run two separate servers?

With a more powerful processor, you can restrict the minecraft server to 1 or 2 cores (it's basically singlethreaded anyway and likes lots of mhz not cores), and have the other stuff running on the other cores.
The minecraft server is probably 32bit, so won't use more than 2 GB of ram - I don't see any justification why you'd NEED to run 2 servers separately.

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

OK... My Minecraft Server runs Windows Server 2003 32-bit. I like that because CraftBukkit is easy to install, and since, while web servers are more set-it-and-forget-it, Minecraft servers require constant futzing around.
Additionally, the Dyn Updater Client for Windows requires, well, Windows
However, I refuse to use Windows Server to run a web server because it's a bit too bloated for my liking...
So I need two seperate servers. One for Windows Server 2003 and one for Ubuntu Server 11.10.

[mariushm]

Re: got a server...

There's nothing stopping you from installing php, apache and mysql and everything you'd have on Ubuntu, on Windows.
In fact, one of my main servers is running Windows 2008 64 bit and it works great.

Really don't understand what you mean by bloating - you can stop extra services and get the whole OS to run in about 110 MB of memory and you don't need to use IIS and other crap from Microsoft to operate it.

Both Apache and MySQL run great as services and php would run as a SAPI module, which is very fast and reliable. I have about 10 websites on the Win 2008 server and it serves thousands of unique visitors daily without issues.

You don't have enterprise websites anyway, so why would you care that maybe Windows would be 10% slower at serving web pages compared to Ubuntu, when you have a handful of visitors to your sites anyway?

I guess it's an easy choice for you since you're not the one paying for electricity and maybe you're not bothered by noise yet... but it's really a weird reasoning you have there.
If you're willing to use the windows box for everything, I'm willing to help you out whenever you have questions.

[shovenose]

Re: got a server...

I'm not willing to use the Windows server computer for everything, sorry.
Web server needs are taken care of by the IBM and all the other random shit (minecraft, dyndns updater, etc.) are on the WIndows Server.

[Uranium-235]

Re: got a server...

with all that ram...

go ahead and install win server 64 bit. Then get sun virtualbox, and install a linux installation to take up say 2 gb ram, and maybe dedicate it to the second processor. Not sure if you really have dual core or hyperthreaded, but if you want minecraft to have the majority of the power and you don't want to fudge around with minecraft in linux, go ahead and run it on windows server. Using linux server for just a web server an't giong to take up much power, at least it won't if you have hardware virt