The Major BBS Forums (Archive)

I figured I'd start a new topic, because the conversation about my new dual xeon server was kind of taking away from the original intention of the first thread.

Anyway, I'm definately considering trying to put worldgroup on it and see how it does, for a couple reasons. My EServer is huge and weighs around 80lbs. Its advantages are mainly being a hotswap-friendly drive. Hotswap hard drives, hotswap fans, hotswap power supplies, and hotswap pci cards. You can literally pull any of these things out (with the exception of some of the pci slots, because not all are hotswap) while the machine is running and replace them, many as easy as a usb cable.

I'm sure the eserver has good power supplies as well.

I don't use hotswap drives. Well, I do have a hotswap cheetah in it but it wasn't compatible with the hotswap bays I had. So, I converted it to be solo. It lacks drive bays. In fact, it doesn't even have one internal hard drive bay. I had to make a 5 1/4" connector for it.

After taking out the extra hotswap bay out, I was able to get that hard drive and a dvd writer in to the slot but do not have room for any more hard drives or cd-roms (unless I do get hotswap hard drives that fit into their bays.)

It has a rack mount. I don't use a rack mount..

The new server actually has ***SIX*** 5 1/4" drive bays and TWO 3 1/3" internal hard drive bays. It'd be good to have multiple cd-roms or dvd-roms for file serving, as I'd like to keep the bbs backup size to something that'll atleast fit on a dvd-r - as I don't want to spend the money on buying expensive tape drive backup tapes for something that's not making me any money in the first place :/

If you figure you can add 4 or 5 dvd-rom drives full of files, with maybe some dual layer discs, that's a bunch of vintage/bbs files and would probably get about 36-40gb and still backup the bbs itself on a dvd-r.

While that isn't going to happen any time soon, what I'm worried about is that the 300 watt power supply in the xeon server may not be able to handle all of that stuff. I know power supplies are mislabeled just like many other things in this world, but I believe about a 550 ot 650 watt one would do better, but here we go with more money for a good one heh...

Any way, just some random thoughts about it..

Since last night, I've been keeping the dual xeon server on-line (can't be accessed from the net, sorry) to test it out, to see if there are any obvious problems. It initially had a problem, but I believe it was caused by a spec of dust or something in the ram slots or something. Took the ram out, put it back in, as well as checked the ide and scsi cables, and all has been well since.

I must say that these xeon cpus are a hell of a lot faster than normal cpus, in comparison to their mhz/ghz ratings.

If everything goes well, then I may end up transferring the worldgroup server to it in the next two or three days.

Malakai wrote:
If you figure you can add 4 or 5 dvd-rom drives full of files, with maybe some dual layer discs, that's a bunch of vintage/bbs files and would probably get about 36-40gb and still backup the bbs itself on a dvd-r.

Actually; I would opt for a good hard drive for the initial backup, particulary since you have the room for them. At least with MS Server you can shadow copy open files to another HD (you can't to a tape or CD/DVD), so you don't have to take the BBS down for backups.

CD/DVD's are too slow and will lop off any speed gains the Xeon's give you; and you really don't need to back up all the files you may want online to d/l, just keep the original CD's as archives. Put your d/loadable files on another HD and have WG reference them on that other drive, then you only need to back up the WG directory. You can also have the HD's spin down when not being accessed, to save power. If your Xeon motherboard has RAID built in it should be fairly easy and inexpensive to populate the bays with HD's.

Don