Geek Bliss

Warning! This post contains a lot of technical terms that a lot of non geek people will look at like O_o O_O o_O ?_? (and faces like that). You have been warned...

Today my dream (and probably a lot of other hardware geeks too) to have a quad processor server computer came to life. Of course I'll bore you with the specs and the history, so here we go, back, back back..one second the flashback machine isn't working....back back back......

I'd say it was about a year ago, I was just fully realizing my extreme want for a 4-way computer when one day my mom's friend called her, her older son had a Slot 2 CPU that he wanted to sell me for $20 if I wanted it. I figured he meant Slot 1, you know Pentium II and III, who knew at the time what I was *really* getting myself into. So I drove over there, looked it over (it's freaking huge!!!) and it was a Pentium II XEON 400mhz CPU Slot 2. I offered him $10 for it becuase $20 seemed a bit much for something I couldn't use or test and I didn't know if it even worked. So then I started searching ebay for it's match, I'd put the code in, SL2U7 if I remember right and see what CPU's came up that would play nice with it in a multiprocessor enviroment. One day I found an auction for three (3) guaranteed to work cpu's that matched mine for extremely cheap....yeah, a week later they were sitting next to the other one. Now before this I was just considering getting a cheap dell 2-way or something and whatever, keep it simple and cheap. Now of course it all changes, you have to do a quad! Yeah I considered doing 2 dual's once or twice, but tis not the geek way....

So now I needed a barebones server that would take 4 P2 based XEONS....yeah you could buy a motherboard but then you needed *all* the other stuff that goes with it that's a ton of money, like VRM's for each CPU, power supplies, case, ram card (we'll get to that gem later), etc

So I was looking at barebone Dell Poweredge servers and everything along those lines on ebay (even checked out the compaq's every once and awhile when I was tired and not thinking straight) Then I came across an auction for an Intel server case complete with motherboard, and like everything! it was $40 i think, and the shipping was $40, no bidding, Buy It Now...The monday I decided to get it I was broke, Friday was payday, I waited, Thursday all 18 something cases that were left were bought out :( I waited about a month until he put more up and grabbed one as quickly as my mouse could carry me.

So the case, it turns out it was brand new, in box. It was bought by some simulater company, they bought a ton of them, and then whatever happened and they didn't have use for that many. So this guy got a hold of them. It comes with 3 400watt redundant power supplies that can be removed (while running i think) if one fails, no unhooking though, unscrew and pull it out and put the new in. It came with 6 hot swappable hard drive trays on an 80pin Ultra SCSI backplane. It already had the cpu blank off's in it (in case you only had one cpu). The VRM modules were there, the ram card holds 16 sticks of 168pin ECC Registered EDO memory to be installed in groups of four (4). And it's 4U rack mountable with the included rails (yeah like I have a rack...yet....) Overall It's a beautiful machine!

So it's sat like that (empty) since around last July before I moved into my house (yeah i had to lug that 100lb monster to the new house :-/ Once a few months ago I looked around for auctions selling 4 256mb sticks of EDO for cheap, that ended up in a no buy...I dropped thought of it for a while...then another major milestone happened, 4 9.1gig 80pin SCSI drives showed up at work that we had no use for and they have silently fallen into the dark of everyone's mind's...yeah I still have to pop the question (no meller! no 5 finger discounts!!...yet....)

Last week I put "168pin EDO" into ebay's search engine and found a few interesting auctions. The one that stood out was for 12 sticks of 32mb memory for $1.00 starting bid, $5.00 shipping, $6.00 for 384mb of ram. That ram arrived today. The last set of 4 sticks wouldn't fit in the Ram card :( but the rest did and the 4 fit my Dual Pentium 2 450mhz project motherboard (I only have cpu's and mobo) so I'll let them slide :-/

So here we are, it's 10:30 at night, I just fit 8 sticks of ram into this computer and I've decided I'll take it over to work tomorrow and plug it in on the workbench and check it out. Much easier that way, work has a workbench...and a lot of power....
Now it's 11:00....I'm back in the room where the server is...minutes later the cats are being stuffed into my room and i'm hauling the server out to the wagon...(so that's why i bought that rig!!)...

I'm glad to say everything works, it's BIOS found all 4 cpu's and the ram seems to pass it's test and shows up as 256mb (blast those last 4 sticks!!!)

So remember kids, all dreams are possible if only you believe!
Now where's my Dual G5!!!!
Night folks.

Star Wars Episode III

This post is brought to you by beefcommando of linuxcult.......and remember kids "BEEF! IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER!" now with really cool Beef Commando action figures in every box.

I went to see Episode III Saturday night. It was sort of a spur of the moment thing, my brother really wanted to go, his friend *were* going until they couldn't, then he wanted to walk the mall with them since they couldn't go........then I was taking him....then my mom remembered our neighbor really likes star wars, so she called him up and he wanted to go. So the three of us went out to the theater that's showing it in digital (i think there is only one here doing that) We arrived really early, so it was like 20 minutes of commercial, then it was movie time, so there was another 4 movie previews (at least)...then it started.

It starts like a typical star wars film, the star wars inspired text in space, opening into a battle. A nice big battle. Some of the humour is kind of corny, but overall the storyline was really good...I'm now realizing that i suck at reviews, so this is now "my trip to see star wars", got it? The biggest thing I have against it is that you already know almost exactly what choices Anakin is going to make, you know he goes to the Dark Side, you know he falls in the lava (at least I hope my readers know that, oops :(), you know a lot of stuff becuase you already watched Episode IV. III does give you an insight into a lot of other things that happened 18 years before IV and provides a lot of really nice battle scenes to keep you into it (except for that guys wife two seats over from me...she slept through the whole thing i think :-/ )
All and all, it's worth watching.

Update?

To all who are wondering why i don't exist on the 'net right now....the blessed little computer that I call my own decided life was just too horrible to bear and slowly sunk into deep depression until finally it just couldn't face the day anymore and has kicked the bucket (the install not the computer) So I've finally drug it off to the workbench to be re done....not sure what distro/OS to put on it (ME WANTS A MAC!!!!) but it will probably be Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) on the 80gig (or the 120) and then Windows XP (I have access to licenses now!!!) on the other one so i can play games and stuff

Update on the wagon:
The gas guage is in fact dead....the tailgate window works fine if you close the door properly (who knew?).... I just picked up the turn signal switch and the outter tie rod end (shake rattle and roll!!!) ....the brakes look like crap so the entire car will be changed (calipers and rotors and pads.OH MY!) .... whoever slapped the tires back on that last time screwed the nuts in with his fingers....the rear tire was completely loose and cut it's own little grooves into the rim, the front driver's side I was more or less able to take off with my fingers (very little loosening required).....the scary part is i drove that thing all over before finding this out (SO THAT WAS WHAT THAT WEIRD NOISE IN THE BACK TIRE WAS!!! O_0)

The beetle definantly needs a new fuel line....waiting on the side of the road for the fuel to catch up is starting to suck almost as much as the noise of the fuel pump as it fights to get gas....

I started learning perl...not sure how long that will last but I had the book and was bored...and the script that didn't work for me worked on the server so now we SSH in and do our little perl stuff :) w00t ....

I'm starting to figure out what i meant by the question mark in the title...this isn't an update, it's a book on what happened....

OH! Saw hitchiker's guide to the galaxy the other week (sunday after it came out)...Not half bad :) I may even write a review and dump it on the site (what else do you use a personal web site for? THESE ARE MY OPINIONS SO YOU ARE FORCED TO ACCEPT THEM AS FACT!!!....yeah...something like that....)

The sad thing is that my typing is this "hyper" and I only had a bit of sugar and a small glass of lightly caffienated soda....:-/

I'll end here...gonna pull an all-nighter for the third time this week...though tonight I have to.... the workstation is required to be back on her desk at 9:00 tomorrow morning, working perfectly....
/me faints