Yesterday, typical, low-key Sunday, saw everyone else watching the Emmys and me doing super geeky stuff in the garage and up here. Click through for the story, but I warn you, it's SUPER FUCKING GEEKY.
Backstory: A few months ago, i bought hardware for a job as part of a lot that the seller wouldn't break apart. Sitting in my garage since then have been a bunch of servers, some of which I intend to re-sell and some of which I intend to keep and put to use somehow or other for fun and games. If I was still in college, my roommates would be excited. Just after I bought everything, I tested the parts I needed for the gig and set those aside. What was left over reads like a 2003-nerd's wet-dream - a pair of fully-laden 3U Dell PowerEdge 1655MC Chassis, one Dell PowerEdge 1655MC Chassis with six blanks, and a Dell PowerEdge 6650 4U server. Each 1655 has six blade-like 3U servers in the chassis, each with a pair of 1.4Ghz or 1.266GHz PIIIs, 1 or 2 GB of RAM and 1 or 2 (in RAID) 73GB HDDs. Also included in this mess were three random extra blades with spare parts.
So last night, I tested, took apart and re-fitted all of the blades and ended up with 12 working blades and three pretty-much gutted extra blades. The mobos still work, but I needed to swap out everything else to get 2 full, working chassis. Now, I have NO IDEA how these things work, really, but so far, I know the hardware is fine. I don't have a USB CD-ROM, so that's an impediment, and taking the time to learn PXE booting and then to create a PXE boot server just seems silly. And impossible. I'm gettng a cheap (but not too cheap!) USB CD-ROM as my next step to see about getting an OS on one of those machines - maybe I'll create a render farm for AfterEffects. Maybe a single 6-core AMD chip from this generation would be faster than a twelve-blade cluster of PIIIs, too. Whatever, I'm reselling most of this heavy iron anyway now that I know it works.
Also in nerdery, I'm currently remote-upgrading the Ubuntu Server that I run in NYC from 4.09 to 4.10, although it turns out that it doesn't skip releases, so last night into this morning I upgraded from 4.09 to 10.09. I'm doing the next step now. I've successfully installed webmin on there, which is awesome. Next thing I need to do is figure out how to assign a URL to the actual server. That means DNS and Apache, I think. Research. And weekends - I can't really do too much of this stuff during the week, right?
I can certainly write about it, though.
Speaking of writing, keep an eye right here on Clapboard for a new occasional feature coming soon!
