My new web server www replaces axle, my former web server.

This server was also part of my plan to downsize and simplify my computing resources. I want to get to the point where I have only two or three machines in the rack, all low-power (MiniITX or MicroATX form factor). Preferably all using similar hardware, all with dual LAN and at least 4 on-board SATA ports.

www hardware

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  Supermicro MBD-X7SPA-H-O	Mini ITX Intel Atom D510 motherboard, 6 SATA, 2 LAN	MBD-X7SPA-H-O	1	$199.99	$199.99
  Western Digital WD1500HLFS	150GB 10,000 rpm SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" hard drive	WD1500HLFS	1	$119.99	$119.99
  SUPERMICRO CSE-731i-300B	pedestal MicroATX server case	CSE-731i-300B	1	$89.99	$89.99
  Western Digital WD1001FALS	1TB 7,200 rpm SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" hard drive	WD1001FALS	1	$87.99	$87.99
  Corsair VS2GSDS667D2	2GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM 667 (PC2 5300) laptop memory	VS2GSDS667D2	1	$31.99	$31.99
  Patriot PSD22G6672S	2GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM 667 (PC2 5300) laptop memory	PSD22G6672S	1	$29.99	$29.99
  Lite-On iHAS324-98B	SATA DVD writer	iHAS324-98B	1	$19.99	$19.99
  Noctua NF-R8	80mm Noctua fan, 31cfm, 10dB, 1800 rpm	NF-R8	2	$18.99	$37.98
  Noctua NF-B9	92mm Noctua fan, 37cfm, 17dB, 1600 rpm	NF-B9	1	$18.99	$18.99
  Nippon Labs SATA-L0.5-R	18" long SATA-II data cable	SATA-L0.5-R	1	$6.99	$6.99
  Athena Power YSATA290	6" long SATA-II power Y-cable	YSATA290	2	$4.19	$8.38
  Link Depot SATA-12	12" long SATA-II cable, straight to straight	SATA-12	2	$3.99	$7.98
  Total					$660.25

Some hints on the extras...

I bought an 80mm fan to populate the empty fan location in the front of the case. I bought the 92mm fan to replace the rear fan included with the case. The 2nd 80mm fan is to blow air across the hard drives via a new hole I'll make in the right side of the case. The Noctua fans are rated for 150,000+ hours, which is well above most fans available. Reliability is very important here.

The SATA power Y-cables... the power supply in the case only has four SATA power connections. I want six, the Y-cables get me there.

The 12" SATA data cables... those are for the hard drives in the 3.5" hard drive cage.

4G of RAM... the maximum the motherboard will support.

www software

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  FreeBSD	FreeBSD 8.2	FreeBSD 8.2	1	$0.00	$0.00
  Total					$0.00

As usual for my headless machines, I'll be running FreeBSD. No issues here, I'm running it on identical hardware on ria.

Grand Total

• www hardware	$660.25
  www software	$0.00
  Total	$660.25

Manuals

• Supermicro 731i-300B case (PDF)
• Supermicro X7SPA-H-O motherboard manual (PDF)
• Patriot PSD22G6672S 2G 200-pin SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) memory (PDF)
• Western Digital Internal Hard Drives Quick Install Guide (PDF)
• Western Digital VelociRaptor Specifications (PDF)
• Lite-On iHAS324 Product Specifications (PDF)
• Lite-On iHAS324 User Manual (PDF)
• Noctua NF-B9 92mm fan spec sheet (PDF)

Diary

• December 16, 2023
  
  • I am in the process of updating from FreeBSD 12.4-STABLE to 13.2-STABLE. It's overdue. The package work is not going to be trivial, but I'll get through it. I've kicked off 'make buildworld'.

    As for what prompted it now... I now need C++20 support for libDwm, and would prefer to get it via the base clang++ compiler and libc++ versus the alternatives. I've been making some changes to libDwm that require C++20 (for concepts).

• July 26, 2015
  
  • depot is now my web server. www has been renamed oldwww and will remain online until I'm sure I have everything I need from it.

• July 17, 2015
  
  • On Monday, a used server should arrive that will replace my primary backup server (depot). What is now depot will become my web server, and I'll retire my existing web server.

    The main motivation for this change: RAM. My existing web server has 4G of RAM and an Intel Atom D510 which can't address more memory. Most of the time this isn't a big issue, but over the years the memory utilization on my server has crept upward to the point where I now see a few hundred megabytes of swap occupied (though very little paging activity). The second motivation is CPU. While my new gallery software is MUCH speedier and more efficient than gallery3, I'd like my bulk photo uploads to be a little snappier. Depot's i5-2405S processor will provide the oomph I need. I know this because depot was the host I used to develop my gallery software.

    The used server arriving on Monday is a Supermicro X8DTN+ motherboard in a Supermicro SC826 2U chassis. It contains a pair of Xeon L5640 CPUs and 48G of RAM. The chassis has 12 hot-swap drive bays. I don't intend to fully occupy the drive bays, but I did buy an LSI 9211-8i flashed to IT mode for ZFS. I have a new Crucial MX100 512G flash drive that I'll use for the OS drive, ands I bought 2 Supermicro hot-swap cages for 2.5" drives; one for the OS drive and one for an SSD SLOG if I decide to add one. Today, I don't have high sync loads and hence I don't need an SLOG. That may change in the future, hence the second 2.5" hot-swap cage.

    The L5640 CPUs are overkill for my needs. I may buy L5630 CPUs to replace them, in the interest of reducing power consumption. I like the idea of having 12 cores for the times I need to do something intensive, but these are older Xeons and not as power-efficient as say a new E3 or E5 Xeon. But this really boils down to up-front cost; I got the server with chassis, rails, motherboard, CPUs and RAM for $600. The LSI 9211-8i was $129. The Crucial MX100 was $159. I will add a pair of 4TB disk drives (ZFS mirror) after I've loaded the operating system.

• June 17, 2015
  
  • My web server is now running FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE. I have some port/pkg updating to do, but the 10.1 upgrade was the first step to allow me to deploy my new gallery software so I can ditch gallery3. The end goal is being able to ditch mysql since it's a resource hog. I might need to replace wordpress in order to do that, but that's not a big deal. I don't use my blog all that often and I really should just write a speedier replacement for it using Wt.

• September 28, 2014
  
  • www now has bash 4.3.27 in response to Shellshock.

• September 27, 2014
  
  • I updated my web server to FreeBSD 8.4-STABLE. I really need to migrate to FreeBSD 9 or 10, but don't have the time at the moment. This update was just to migrate to the new port packaging and pick up the new bash shell to address security issues.

• December 21, 2012
  
  • I finally got around to adding a chart for UPS status on the Site Health page. I've only been collecting this data since December 14, 2012. It is useful for tracking my power consumption and UPS load, and of course battery charge level and expected runtime if the AC power disappears.

• December 2, 2012
  
  • I installed smartmontools from ports, and enabled smartd in /etc/rc.conf. I configured the disks I want monitored in /etc/periodic.conf. I then started smartd.

• April 26, 2012
  
  • I completed www's upgrade from FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE to FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE.

    I installed gcc-4.6.4.20120420 from ports.

• April 25, 2012
  
  • I started upgrading www from FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE to FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE.

• April 18, 2011
  
  • I updated www to FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE.

• April 5, 2011
  
  • I discovered an annoyance while working on my web site traffic tracker. With TSO enabled, tcpdump reports many 0-length packets. Ditto for anything using libpcap, which my collector program is using. It makes data collection worthless, so I disabled it on the ethernet interface (ifconfig em0 ... -tso).

• February 28, 2011
  
  • On my way home, I stopped at Microcenter and picked up a replacement SO-DIMM for the bad one I bought there on Saturday. I found a Crucial SO-DIMM replacement, which I installed when I got home. So far, so good. No read/write failure during POST, and the machine is running fine.

            last pid:  1473;  load averages:  0.00,  0.16,  0.15    up 0+00:07:59  20:58:05
            55 processes:  1 running, 53 sleeping, 1 stopped
            CPU 0:  0.4% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.6% idle
            CPU 1:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
            CPU 2:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
            CPU 3:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
            Mem: 69M Active, 31M Inact, 97M Wired, 252K Cache, 31M Buf, 3723M Free
            Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free
            

• February 27, 2011
  
  • The SO-DIMM I bought from Microcenter is bad. It fails the BIOS' read/write test. I ordered a Corsair VS2GSDS667D2 from Newegg to replace it. I will try to exchange the bad one at Microcenter unless I can get a refund.

    I'm starting to dislike Microcenter. The failed SO-DIMM packaging appeared to have been opened before, presumably because they put returns right back on the shelf. The customer service in the store is horrible (very long waits, combative, waiting area is way too small). In addition, on weekends the parking lot is completely full with 10 to 15 cars circling around in search of a parking spot. I had to park illegally in the apartment complex next door. Waste my time, you lose me as a customer. Especially since your price on this SO-DIMM was $15 more than Newegg.

• February 26, 2011
  
  • I picked up the second 2G SO-DIMM from Microcenter.

    I installed the second SO-DIMM and put www into the rack.

    I also made some tweaks to dwmsitemenu to make it consider web page files in the same directory as sibling candidates.

    I'm re-installing some ports, since wordpress caused an older version of mysql-server to be installed. I need to re-install gallery3 and wordpress after mysql-server-5.5.9 is installed, and also install mysql++-mysql55-3.0.8

• February 25, 2011
  
  • I installed more ports:
    • GraphicsMagick-1.3.12
    • apache-2.2.17
    • gallery3-3.0.1
    • php-5.2.17
    • sqlite3-3.7.4
    • unzip-6.0
    • wordpress-3.0.5,1
    • xapian-core-1.0.22
    • zip-3.0
    
    In the queue or in process:

• February 24, 2011
  
  • I started installing ports I know I need on all machines:
    • sudo
    • emacs-nox11
    • gcc-4.5

    Obviously all dependencies were also built and installed automatically.

• February 23, 2011
  
  • Starting from a FreeBSD 8.2-BETA2 installation, I built a new kernel to add coretemp(4), and rebooted to make sure all was well.

    I then updated the ports tree and the FreeBSD source using csup. Then the usual:

    • make buildworld
    • make installkernel KERNCONF=www
    • reboot
    • mergemaster -p
    • make installworld
    • make delete-old
    • mergemaster
    • reboot
    • make delete-old-libs

• February 22, 2011
  
  • The remaining parts for www arrived. However, I forgot to order the second 2G SO-DIMM. I'll need to order it, 2G total RAM isn't sufficient.

    In the meantime, I cut the hole for the Noctua NF-R8 80mm fan to cool the hard drives. I installed that fan, plus the second Noctua NF-R8. I replaced the original case fan with the Noctua NF-B9. I installed the Supermicro MBD-X7SPA-H-O motherboard with the first Patroit PSD22G6672S 2G SO-DIMM, and installed the Lite-On iHAS324-98B SATA DVD writer. I also installed the Western Digital WD1500HLFS 150GB VelociRaptor 10,000 rpm SATA hard drive, and the Western Digital WD1001FALS 1TB Caviar 7,200 rpm SATA hard drive.

    I powered the machine and started loading FreeBSD 8.2.

    One scare I had during installation: the header for the front panel IDC cable is not keyed. I assumed the wrong orientation, which put the motherboard in a state where it would not power up or send a power-up signal to the power supply after the front panel IDC cable was oriented correctly. the only solution I found to this problem was to use the "Force Power" juymper on the motherboard. This powered everything up fine, and it now powers up fine with the jumper removed.

• February 17, 2011
  
  • The remaining parts for www are on their way from Newegg.

• February 15, 2011
  
  • I picked up the CSE-731i-300B case for www from Microcenter for $87.99 plus tax. I also ordered the remaining initial parts for www from from Newegg.