I recently bought a server from eBay to replace the duties of my storage server (depot). depot will become my web server. I needed to do this because my web server was an Atom D510 based system. I need more RAM than can be addressed with an Atom D510. I also wanted ECC memory in my storage server since I’m about to start using ZFS pools and can use the integrity provided by ECC.<\/p>\n
The server I bought is overkill for my current needs, but it was inexpensive because it’s older technology. It is a Supermicro X8DTN+ motherboard with a pair of Xeon L5640 CPUs and 48G of registered ECC RAM (six 8G sticks). It’s in a Supermicro SC826 chassis with a BPN-SAS-826EL backplane. This wasn’t the backplane I wanted; the eBay description was incorrect. However, it’ll work for my needs since I don’t really need more than 4 SAS lanes. As an upside, the cabling is cleaner than SFF to SATA breakout cables. I’m using an LSI 9211-8i PCIe x4 HBA to connect the backplane to the motherboard.<\/p>\n
As an aside, I’ve never owned a machine with 12 CPU cores that can run 24 hyperthreads. While the L5640 runs at a paltry 2.26GHz, it is very handy to be able to run gmake -j24<\/tt> when doing software development. I’m using a Crucial MX100 512G SSD as my OS drive, because it was inexpensive (an Amazon Prime Day deal). I would normally choose a Samsung 850 Pro, but I couldn’t justify the price for setting up this machine. I can always change it later. At any rate, compiles of my software are speedy on this machine, which means I can get back to finishing my BGP-4 development along with some other things.<\/p>\n
The new machine is named kiva<\/tt> (thanks to Julie for the name!). Other than the Crucial MX100, it has an HGST 4TB Deskstar that will host backups of other machines. Backups of kiva<\/tt> are currently going to another HGST 4TB Desktar in depot<\/tt>. kiva<\/tt> is running FreeBSD 10.2-BETA2 (i.e. 10.1-STABLE on its way to 10.2). It is mounted in the rack, but I’ll likely change its position later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently bought a server from eBay to replace the duties of my storage server (depot). depot will become my web server. I needed to do this because my web server was an Atom D510 based system. I need more RAM than can be addressed with an Atom D510. I also wanted ECC memory in … <\/p>\n