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.