The Major BBS Forums (Archive)

Well, Nostalgia BBS, after its initial testing period, has always ran its main server from a "Real" server, starting with an Xseries 342 eserver and then going from there to a supermicro server, but all of the other servers have been standard PC.

I recently ordered a new xeon 3ghz xseries 235 eserver, and tonight, I ordered two new xeon cpus for the supermicro system.

The new DMA server I've been working on, the motherboard isn't a true server motherboard, but the case, raid card, and scsi drives are. So, I guess you could call it a hybrid pc/server.

Until recently, I thought that I was just going to ditch the 342 xseries system, even put it up for sale, and not even one offer came in. So, I'm just going to upgrade it to dual 1.4ghz tualatin processors, install a nice raid card, and get some hotswap hard drives for it. It could potentially run my PHP/SQL server.

Hopefully, this stuff will be done soon, because I probably won't have a lot of free time in the coming months, after starting a new trade program.

What's every one elses setups?

Malakai wrote:Well, Nostalgia BBS, after its initial testing period, has always ran its main server from a "Real" server, starting with an Xseries 342 eserver and then going from there to a supermicro server, but all of the other servers have been standard PC.

I recently ordered a new xeon 3ghz xseries 235 eserver, and tonight, I ordered two new xeon cpus for the supermicro system.

The new DMA server I've been working on, the motherboard isn't a true server motherboard, but the case, raid card, and scsi drives are. So, I guess you could call it a hybrid pc/server.

Until recently, I thought that I was just going to ditch the 342 xseries system, even put it up for sale, and not even one offer came in. So, I'm just going to upgrade it to dual 1.4ghz tualatin processors, install a nice raid card, and get some hotswap hard drives for it. It could potentially run my PHP/SQL server.

Hopefully, this stuff will be done soon, because I probably won't have a lot of free time in the coming months, after starting a new trade program.

What's every one elses setups?

I have been running HP E-60 netservers dual cpu P-600's with raid 5 for long time. Nice mid towers, one for the bbs one dev. I recently picked up a HP DL580 G2 server, with 4- 1.9 ghz cpu's hot swap everthing, drives, ram, power supplies and pci-x cards. Its nice not haveing to shut down for cleaning. Runs great but is about 80-90 db when the fans kick into high speed. Its more than capable of running PhP/SQL, altho I would rather see GALSQL.DLL appear from WG development. If you want more info and some pics
http://theswampbbs.dyndns.org/dl580.htm

That G2 looks a lot like my xseries 342. Do you have yours on a rack system? The 342 weighs about 60 lbs, and the box that's shipping the new 235 weighs 85 lbs, but not sure how much of that is packing weight. The 235 is actually a tower, but they made a conversion kit for it to change it over to a rack. The conversion kit would cost more than I paid for the system lol.

It would be nice, however, just to have everything in one rack and just use a nice KVM switch to control everything. It'd take up a lot less space.

Malakai wrote:That G2 looks a lot like my xseries 342. Do you have yours on a rack system? The 342 weighs about 60 lbs, and the box that's shipping the new 235 weighs 85 lbs, but not sure how much of that is packing weight. The 235 is actually a tower, but they made a conversion kit for it to change it over to a rack. The conversion kit would cost more than I paid for the system lol.

It would be nice, however, just to have everything in one rack and just use a nice KVM switch to control everything. It'd take up a lot less space.

The dl580 is 88 lbs a heavy beastie. I will be putting into a rack as soon as the budget permits. Altho when I bring it home the girlfriend will probably depart Most of the racks run about 1k with power plugs and accessories.

The KVM switch is nice to have, beats the heck out of 3-4 monitors and saves a bit of power.

Yeah, i bought a KVM when I had all of the BBS computers just kind of piled up in a corner somewhere, but it was a cheaper one, and the main problem it had was that when you changed to a different pc and then back, the mouse driver wouldn't recognize the mouse. It was also powered by the ports, but you can get ones that are self-powered with an ac adapter.

If you're in an enviroment where you don't need a mouse, a cheap kvm switch works great though. Command line linux, dos, or if you're use to doing windows stuff with out a mouse heh..

Malakai wrote:Yeah, i bought a KVM when I had all of the BBS computers just kind of piled up in a corner somewhere, but it was a cheaper one, and the main problem it had was that when you changed to a different pc and then back, the mouse driver wouldn't recognize the mouse. It was also powered by the ports, but you can get ones that are self-powered with an ac adapter.

If you're in an enviroment where you don't need a mouse, a cheap kvm switch works great though. Command line linux, dos, or if you're use to doing windows stuff with out a mouse heh..

The one I grabed was 45 bucks (4 computers in) had some troubles getting the mouse to go also. I switched one from usb to bus port and they all started to work. I think they need to get the power thru bus or com port, says in the doc's powered from keyboard buy not so.

Speaking of KVM switches, I just hooked mine up with the new DMA server I'm testing, and just hooked the mouse port out from it, and it powers the kvm fine. I just kept my regular mouse hooked to the pc and didn't use a mouse on the DMA server. It's working good like that

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I have a Belkin F1D108-OSD Omni View Pro 8-Port KVM to run 5 different computers. Its really nice to be able to switch back and forth between computers by pressing the 'Scroll Lock' key twice and then punching the port number or hitting the up or down direction arrows.

Every now and then I'll lose the mouse on a computer, but have found that switching back and forth between several computers while continously moving the mouse, that the mouse control is eventually restored and I can go on with what I wanted to do with that computer. Only rarely and mostly with my NT4 Server do I have to restart the computer to get mouse control back.

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