Many of you may be familiar with Cemetech0; it forms the backbone of the wordNet service, and for several months hosted Cemetech's SAX system. However, it's a 400MHz Dell PII with 192MB, and I discovered it was somewhat inadequate for some of the new tasks I wanted it to perform, especially for wordNet and WorldTrends. First, some pix of Cemetech0 in its new home, the microLab server rack:

Cemetech0 is the white machine at top right, while Cemetech1 is the blade just above the white machine at bottom right:


Another shot of Cemetech0 (the lower machine; the upper one is Lante):


A third shot of Cemetech0; you can vaguely see the LEDs of the Eth0 Indicator that I published a while ago:


Cemetech1. Note the massiveness of the server blade.


Under each of those two fans is a CPU; also check out the 4x1GB sticks of PC2100 DDR RAM and the riser card for the SCSI adapter.


There's three SCSI HDs in the six bays at the front, but only 2 are hooked up for now. At right are the CD-ROM and floppy drives.


I built Cemetech1 out of parts scavenged from old, non-functional servers; the tentative specs are as such:

CPUs: 2x AMD Athlon 1900+ @ 1.6GHz each
RAM: 4x 1GB DDR PC2100
HDDs: 2x HP 73.8GB SCSI 160Mb/s
HD Controller: Adaptec dual-channel SCSI card
CD: 52x CD-ROM
NIC: Dual 10/100 Ethernet NICs

Holy will this make the SAX text display delay time any shorter?

uberness! Cemetech1 is sechsay in that custom case

No, SAX is going to stay on Cemetech-1 (that's a negative one).

@Elf: huh? It's a standard blade server case, about 3 feet by 2 feet by 4 inches...

cool.

/me would love to able to build a server like that. I am assuming you will be using Linux on this machine, right?

I installed a base of Ubuntu 6.06 and customized it to remove the GUI, add all the server stuff, and optimized the boot processes for the dual-CPU nature of the machine.

<]=D Celebrate!

Congrats on that mate! Love to see what you use Cemetech1 for - besides wN and WT!

Thanks, me too. I hope it's something using massive amounts of data.

why not just use Ubuntu server edition.....

A, I wanted something more customized than the basic server build, B, I didn't have a Server CD handy and didn't feel like burning one.

ah, you slacker. Ah well, hope this goes well for you.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-server
sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop

Ooh, any chance you can have that running a dedicated 24/7 UT2k4 server?

@Elf: I shall do that immediately!
@Kllrnohj: I somehow think the school would frown upon that.

Why? If its your PC, it shouldn't matter - game servers are rather low-bandwidth, relying more on ping and latency (hence the reason you can successfully host one just fine on a home DSL/Cable connection). It shouldn't cause that much network load (no more than a web crawler )

Yeah, but it's a .cooper.edu server, and I doubt they'd appreciate that. Anyway, I have better, more constructive stuff to do with it.


Code:


Turns out I had to recompile my kernel with the 686 sources instead of 386. Didn't know 386 didn't have multiple CPU support.

The linux i386 kernel should support SMP just fine, if it's compiled into the kernel. How do you think we ran linux on those dual pentium servers back in the day? (Yes I do mean the original pentium chips.)

Let me rephrase that then. The default 386 kernel image for Ubuntu 6.06 doesn't have SMP support, while the default 686 kernel image does.

did you compile, or did you just apt?

I apted; I didn't have the margin for downtime to compile it.