Part I: Rebuilding ZEUS, the journey of training the next home server
I’ve been looking at upgrading our existing home server from the archaic (and unsupported!) Ubuntu Gutsy (because I was feeling gutsy at the time) to something newer, fresher and that will last me at least another 2 years. This is purely for my documentation.
Current Setup
Currently running an AMD setup with Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) – I didn’t think it would last this long, honest! Ubuntu 6.06 had too many issues with the hardware/driver incompatibilities.
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=7.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=gutsy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 7.10"
On an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard (because you know, servers need SLI!) sporting a AMD Athlon64 3200+ (the only AMD CPU at home!) with 2Gb of RAM (hey, DDR1 wasn’t cheap enough!)
lspci
00:00.0 Memory controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Memory Controller (rev a3)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 ISA Bridge (rev f3)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation CK804 SMBus (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a2)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 IDE (rev f2)
00:07.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCI Bridge (rev f2)
00:0a.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev f3)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev f3)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev f3)
00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev f3)
00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce 7300 GT] (rev a1)
05:06.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
05:07.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. Adaptec AAR-1210SA SATA HostRAID Controller (rev 02)
05:0a.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
05:0b.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
05:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13)
/proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 47
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1000.000
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow up pni lahf_lm ts fid vid ttp tm stc
bogomips : 2011.59
clflush size : 64
This faithful boxen has been the primary source of our fileserver (XFS+LVM 3Tb) – used internal to our house and also by others who upload their stuff to be backed up. Subversion repositories, Apache/LightHttpd test servers for PHP work, Virtualisation for Windows 2003, 2000 and SqlServers running for testing and several other things (think: TeamCity, Continuous Integration tools, Confluence etc). Its also been damn convenient when your at work or on holidays to be able to login, muse about via SSH and even fix things remotely.
Needs & Wants
The new server will need to fulfil the following roles:
- Function as a NAS to continue to offer backup (via users home directories) and storage options
- No file-system constraints aside from no Ext3 or ReiserFS.
- Offer the ability to still run Virtual Machines, need to virtualise CentOS, Ubuntu and Windows for testing, they’ll be running in� Bridged mode
- No real need for a Gui (I can consider myself a little l33t than a few years ago)
- Run a Subversion repository (not that hard!)
The idea is to have a bare bones operating system install and have the virtual machines handle the hard and ugly work – webservers to test things, servers to try development deployments (java) and other bits and pieces. The core OS just has to manage the NAS and allow the ability to SSH in to offer subversion access.
Hardware
The hardware I’ve picked from things I had around the place, the only thing I’ve bought is just new sticks of RAM.
Motherboard: ASUS P5QL-PRO
This board offered some excellent specifications via the P43 chipset, the things I looked for was the number of SATA ports ‘out of the box’ – 6 native SATA2, the number of 1x PCIe slots (2!) for future addions of PCIe SATA adapters and the maximum amount of memory possible (8Gb). Oh ofcourse, something cheapy and that can run the CPU I had around. A Gigabit NIC was also important (dual would be better!) but if it wasn’t supported I had a trusty Intel PRO 1000MT Server PCI cards to fill the void – almost everything supports them (e1000)!
CPU: Intel Core-2 E6750 – 2.66Ghz (65W TDP, VT)
Importance was Intel-VT support, low TDP and a dualcore thats not too high.
RAM: Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5 (4Gb kit x 2 = 8Gb)
Cheapy cheapy, twice the fun of a regular kit, slightly higher CAS, but who CAreS this isnt being overclocked.
Graphics: ASUS 9400GT PCI-Express
The cheapest graphics card to be found at the legendary& award winning computer store MSY Technologies. Depending on how the drivers go (I’m usually biased towards ATI for all Linuxes) I might endup paying for a ATi card later.
Next up the investigation, be warned though I started this initially back in June/July (possibly a bit earlier).