Well, my technology adventure continues.  Bought myself the Antec Titan 650, good EATX Case with a 650watt Antec TruePower Trio. First of all, i got the Intel S5000PSL, a server board with dual Xeon 771 sockets, FB-DIMMS etc. I installed this into my system correctly, along with Xeon heatsinks, correct jumper setup, etc. Powered the machine on, and it would boot up fine,well “Fine”, but no VGA output and no USB output. Which was interesting, as to my knowledge those are 2 components controlled by the Southbridge. I tried fiddling with power, no joy. I took the board out, and realised i had a copper mounting screw in the wrong hole;  i corrected this, tried again only this time the server would boot up, give me an error light sequence, then turn off. Still no VGA, hummm. I tried it with dual-core Xeons, Quad-core Xeons, various sticks of RAM, various manufacturers, and still no joy. I looked at the booklet and compared it to the LED’s, and it was giving me a “Chipset error – irreversable damage”, which was great.

So, i moved on to a secondary board i have – the S5000XVN – a hiiiigh end, workstation board, supporting dual Xeon (SKT771) processors, PCI-E x16, FB-DIMMs etc. Basically, its awesome – be jealous.

I installed the board as normal, cabled it up, and commandeered a GeForce server PCIE card for testing along with a few sticks of RAM again. Success! This time it worked! Although very warmly i might add! I replaced the Woodcrest B3 chips with Clovertown (Quad-core Xeons) and started her up, to no avail – except a series of loud short beeps! I investigated everything and still no joy. After scouring the internet all night, i remembered that the BIOS is probably set to stock – which is the stock BIOS supporting only dual-core Xeons (as per the manual). When i put the dual-cores back in, success, she booted back up. So now im upgrading my BIOS to support Clovertown, and ill have an 8 Core, Potentially 16GB machine with a PCI-E Slot and Adaptec RAID controller to boot! Woop.

In spec, the machine is as follows:-

Case: Antec Titan, PSU: Antec TruePower Trio 650Watt; CPU(s): Xeon 5365 x 2 (3Ghz, 2×4Mb L2 Cache, 1333Mhz FSB, 120w TDP), 4GB Samsung FB-DIMM DDR2 667Mhz Pc2-5300, GeForce 7300GS (Cheap but i only need it to display).

A very tasty machine.

Got my new K850i through on Thursday morning at 8.55am (they said 9am, damn their efficiency). The new firmware is a lot better, the media centre stylie they have running on it is a lot quicker and responsive – partly due to the fact theyve reprogrammed it to only pull the titles from the database, not title, artist and image, which saves a lot of time on loading. Have been back at home since Thursday afternoon, the journey down went pretty smoothly, got in for about 6.20pm where me and Fran went for a subway before spending Thursday chilling out.

Went to university on Friday and met up with Matt prior to our presentation, was fun to catch up. The presentation went well, and apparently mine and Matt were the best 2 in the whole group, which was good to know! Spent the rest of the day sitting in the new Lowrys called “Yours”, which is very nice and a massive improvement on Lowrys. Caught up with Cons and Joe, and it was nice to have the H36′ers back together again! Got home about 6pm and spend the rest of the night chilling out.

Fran is also sat here pretending not to read what im typing.

Well, i’m now on my 3rd, yes 3rd, Sony Ericsson K850i handset, the first 2 having died on me. Phone number 1 died because the touch screen would barely respond and the media centre bit of it refused to work. Phone 2 has now died, because when i turn it on, it decides it doesnt like being turned on and powers itself off whenever it feels like it, raaaaaaah. So i phoned up Orange (actually got an english call centre, nice) and RMA’d my phone once again. If this one breaks, im going to get my phone swapped for a new model, im sick of this shitey phone and its refusal to work!!!!!

Well, ive finally found a way to get the dreaded EEATX boards working! Using an ollllld Intel “KHD3BASE450″ Chassis, you can mount the EEATX format boards (after taking out the PSU) perfectly. We are using the Supermicro X7DB8+ motherboards for what its worth.

Once i took the PSU off, mounted the new motherboard screwed it in tightly, i now had the problem of remounting the PSU. I decided to do this the simple way,i  took off the PSU mounting bracket, flipped it around, and rescrewed it on (with some very ham-fisted screwing it had to be said). Once the bracket was firmly inplace, you can then re-mount your PSU perfectly, although again you might need to ham-fist a few screws to get them in.

Once this was done, i was presented with 2 more problems – power and powering on. The Supermicro Dxxxxx motherboard we are using drags so much power it requires the normal 24, 8 AND a 4 pin ATX12v power module. My power supply didnt have a 4 pin. The resolve to this was a dinky little £2 adapter from eBay, which works like a charm.

Now, the main problem i have been presented with, with trying to get a new motherboard to play nicely with an old chassis, is the physical act of getting the front panel to interact with the board itself. On the board that was previously in the Intel KHD3BASE450 (Pentium 3/ Earrrrrly Xeon), the front panel connected to the motherboard with a Floppy Disk ribbon style connector – something which isnt evident on newer boards.

Now for the ingenuity – on these old case there are intrusion detection switches, one at the front and one at the back. When the case lid is on, the intrusion detection switch is pushed in at the back, created a full circuit. The Intrusion detection of course, connects to the motherboard via standard, 2 pin, jumper, with positive, and negative wires. I decided to take these wires, place them on pin 0+1 on the motherboard for where the front panel should connect, and take the “rear intrusion switch” down so that there would always be a full circuit.

When the intrusion switch at the front is pressed, it acts like a power switch and boots the Server! Hurrah! This means that i’ve taken about £2000 of skipped hardware, and turned them into servers, for free! Along with some cheap xeon heatsinks and some borrowed RAM, i now have 2 fully working, 8-core Xeon servers. Ta-Da!

Also, i have been working on my Cisco lab in preparation for my CCNA exam next month – ive invested in a Cisco 2950 (for VLANs and L2 switching), a 2612 Router, and a 2610 Router. These are for practicing stuff like routing tables and protocols, VLAN routing, etc.

Well, the construction of my super computer has begun lol After having 2 Woodcrest based boards with quad-core Xeon support etc and finding out that they are EEATX and that the only compatible chassis’ are £250+ i had to go back to the drawing board.

I managed to shotgun some old server rigs from our labs that were being binned as part of our clean out, which were physically big enough. However the PSU’s werent pushing enough wattage, more to the point they didnt have the correct 4 pin ATX12v connectors. This is easy to fix, however when coupled with the fact that the chassis front panel method of connecting to the mobo is so outdated it isnt even google-able, i decided to scrap the idea (No jumpers?! WTF?!).

Im going to just recap a little here, the reason im actually building this machine is for my virtualisation final year project, whereby im going to need obviously a fairly powerful machine to run all the VM’s, VM technology etc. Ive already got Education licensing for all VMWare products, and Xen etc. However the hardware is the issue.

Fast forward to today, whereby using a bit of blag and some guile ive managed to commandeer myself a Intel S5000PSL, capable of supporting 2 Socket 771 Multi-core Xeon CPU’s – of which i have 2, Quad-Core Clovertown Xeons, which will do very nicely.

Now i have the motherboard, and the CPU’s sorted, i need to find where to get my other items. I have a load of EATX chassis’ at my desk, but they are very old and very clunky and well..”Grey”. So i decided to make my first investment of this project, and spend £110 on an Antec Titan, an EATX Server Chassis thats comes bundled with a 650w Antec truePower Trio! Which is normally worth £70 on its own anyway. A Definite bargain. This will go great with my board and CPU’s.

I bought 2 Xeon passive heatsinks off the Intel Shop, which hopefully (fingers crossed), will work first time with the board and the case (mounting problems perhaps?). All that i need to do now, is get some FB-DIMM’s and im sorted. I might be getting some free from work as we are upgrading all our RAM from DDR2 to DDR3 as part of our refresh, otherwise you can get them for £59 for 2GB which isnt too bad at all!

After ive got Motherboard, CPU, Chassis, Heatsinks, RAM i need to procure a CD Drive and im going to be sorted. Then i’ll use one of my many hard drives and the server will be ready to go.

Interesting thing about VMWare ESX is apparently need to attach an iSCSI SAN to get it to install (it worked fine on a single core, AMD CPU based workstation system i had), which was a total fluke obviously as it wouldnt install afterwards on a Q6600 based system, or a Celeron D based system (neither have SAN’s funnily enough).

A way to get round this, is to apparently create a software based Linux SAN (a distro), so i’m currently looking into this. Anyone know where i can get this from?

Anyway, onwards and upwards. 

Well, im confused. My bank balance is X, but my available balance is X – 170 quid. Thats after ive paid for, my Linkin park and Jay-Z tickets (x 2), Yay. And all the crap i bought at the weekend!? The worlds gone mad.

In other news, ive bought and built my parents PC so that one is done. Regards to my own rig, ive decided against buying one and instead im going to use the freebies i get from intel to build it (cheers all). Apparently ESX requires a SAN, however theres apparently a Linux distro you can use to replicate a software-based SAN to fool ESX, so i’ll probably do that hehe.

Also, me and Fran are going up to Manchester next week because i have to do a university presentation on my placement year (fun fun fun). She’s also going to meet the parents too (oh no..). Should be interesting!

PS: Mi Shakes are amazing.