Where's Oz? Hardware questions

[Scroggie]

Anyhow, he may not be around anymore. Al might know.

What is the life cycle of a server. I am having to do some upgrade work: just over 2 year old, Dell 400SC power edge server, windowsXP->SP1->sp2 with pentium 4, 2.4ghz, 1gig ram. Started slowing down, mostly graphics related, I think its the default card, PCI ATI Rage XL. Put in my old AGP PNY Verto GeForce 6200, seems to be better. Crawled in graphics benchmarks, now it flies.

I wondering how much longer I can expect. 2 years, 24 hours/7days up, running MySQL and some mirroring software mostly. My front ends are all newer machines. Is it gettting jealous. Should I stuff more ram in (only has 2 dimm slots and 2 ddr slots).

BTW Al, it was an Ebay special. Had to put my own OS on it.

[Scroggie]

Hey its faster than my AMD 4200 64x2 with ATI Radeonx1300...wow. (benchmarking on it while surfing).

[Graham]

It all really depends on what you want your server to do ... perhaps installing a server OS might also help!

[alborg]

Hi Scroggie!

>>> pentium 4, 2.4ghz, 1gig ram

Hey, that's enough power to run most of the office database systems! Heck, last month I just purchased a Dell with just those specs! I couldn't pass it up. The guy had upgraded it with a 2nd 160GB HD and threw in MS Windows Professional, MS Office 2003, Adobe Acrobat 7.0 (the retail program), and other neat junk... all for a mere $279 plus $35 S&H.

If you plan on doing Naturally Speaking 8, though, a 3.0GHz CPU chip is a must... I know that my 1.5GHz system really wears out with this program... I still have to test it with the 2.4GHz. It scans well, though, into Paperport 9 (sans OCR).

If you want to really tax your system, check out the new Vongo movie download service (unlimited movies for less than $10 a month). Their space hungry browser will kind of lock up a bit occasionally with my 1GHz Compaq T1000 Tablet PC, but it still does OK on my Dell Latitude laptop (1.6GHz).

What I do sometimes is purchase a "barebones" from eBay... you can get a 3.2GHz now for less than $300 and simply transfer all of your "stuff"! Heck, I just finished purchasing a Dell 2.8GHz "HT" for $300 (RAM, 80GB HD, and shipping included). All I gotta do is purchase more RAM.

I love this cheap stuff! Now, where is Oz? :confused:

Al

[Scroggie]

Al, I tried DNS version 8 but gave up. It will pick the oddest word combinations sometimes. I type faster than I speak sometimes...

All that stuff for ~300 dollars. You the man. I'm gonna pull out one of the drives and upgrade space, 200gig Maxtor SATA drive for $109, minus $50 rebate.

Graham: what OS would that be...I am thinking about Ubuntu Linux, I can still run MySQL and probably do a better job with mirroring and the like.

[Graham]

Yes, most any mainstream Linux, or Solaris x86, would be fine as a server OS .. which XP Sp2 is not. If you run Linux in gui mode 3, you'll get better performance as well.

I'm using Windows 2003 as my server OS with a lower config than yours, and it works fine for what we do ... which is basically just control the domain, and serve up the EMR for the users.

[alborg]

Yes, most any mainstream Linux, or Solaris x86, would be fine as a server OS .. which XP Sp2 is not. If you run Linux in gui mode 3, you'll get better performance as well.

I'm using Windows 2003 as my server OS with a lower config than yours, and it works fine for what we do ... which is basically just control the domain, and serve up the EMR for the users.

One cool eBay deal I stumbled into the other day are computer installation disks with Windows XP Professional. It seems that many folks end up with these installation disks strewn around with nothing to do. If you do a search on eBay for "installation software" you'll stumble on dozens of them, selling for less than $30. They do not have the "COA" key.

The kicker is that if you call Microsoft (MS) and give them the number right there on the disk, MS will give you a new COA key. About 6 months ago I got a Tablet PC reinstallation disk for my old IBM touchscreen laptop that still works. You can't usually get these unless you actually buy a Tablet PC. I called MS who told me to call the Motion tablet folks (MTF). The MTF weren't very helpful, so when I told that to the MS guy (who was in India, BTW), he finally relented to give me a new DOA because the disk was legal and binding!

That's over a hundred bucks in savings... for just a couple of calls. Scroggie- am I the man? :D

Cheers,
Al

[Scroggie]

Al, I've always said you da man.
I did get screwed buying the Dragon from eBay. After I decided I didn't want it, I re-sold it. The guy who bought called Scansoft and they wouldn't let him transfer the licence. Turned out it had been "around" the block a few times. Had to buy him a legit licence. Baaaaaa.
One bad experience. The rest have been good.

[Scroggie]

Now here's some thinks I'm afraid of:
RAID: not the bug stuff. Setting up a RAID array. Would probably like RAID1, mirroring. Don't know why. How's linux with this?

LINUX: Okay probably because I've not made the full commitment. Last try was Ubuntu AMD-64 with my X2 on a partitioned windows disk. X-server wouldn't work unless I tweaked the video card drivers. Never got them to work right (ATI x1300). Seems that the combo has some issues, had to use generic VESA drivers and config a lot from the command line. Eventually I just bailed. Other experiences, Puppy linux, just for a little while. RedHat, a few years ago on a spare box (okay, one with crappy outdated hardware). Seems I could never get a good install.

Domain server. The company I work for has a reluctance to set one up. As a result we've got a bunch of different workgroups but no cohesive domain just default: MSHOME, WORKGROUP et cetera. How hard is this to set up?

I also afraid of carnies, but that's a different issue.

[Graham]

I set up Red Hat a couple of years ago on a HP Proliant server with Raid 1. I just made sure that the Raid card I purchased was certified to be used with the Proliant and RH. I had to alter the bios setting to disable the HP logo on boot to get the raid card recognised, but otherwise had no problems.

Only had to install a domain controller on Windows 2003.

Whatever OS you choose, make sure that there are fora around with enough users that you can consult for help.