Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

So what's the first thing I had to do when shown a pile of servers to install? That's right, crack them open and see what makes 'em tick. I'll start out with the web servers. Web Servers These are 3 machines that were laid out pretty cleanly. You probably can't see it, but there are 4 fans in front of each CPU. Several fans on the power supply and another across the motherboard make this one noisy server. Of course, since heat is the natural enemy of computers, I don't really care that it has more fans than all of the PC's in my office combined. I think that's a good thing. As you can see from the picture above, the memory is easy to get at, and the wiring is pretty straight forward. There wasn't even a need for an add-on board in these servers. Of course, pretty much anything failing means the motherboard needs to be replaced in a Dell, but that's the way most any name brand server is these days. Mail Server The mail server that we'll be usi...

We're trying to upgrade to a load balanced, fully redundant web serving platform now. What we currently have was a $3000 server about 30 months ago, so it's time to look at upgrades. I don't usually like Dell, but their prices are something else. As we're getting ready to upgrade our servers, I happened across Dell's website and checked what they had for a deal at the moment. We ended up getting a few at stupid prices - stupid meaning very low for what we're getting. Base Model The base model on these machines is a 1U rackmount 2.8GHz/2MB Cache Xeon with 1GB RAM, 2 x GB ethernet ports and an 80GB HDD. Nothing too impressive. Free Upgrade To start making it seem a little nicer, they offered a FREE second processor. Customization We added in 7GB more RAM, another drive (mirroring is a good thing) and a few other odds and ends including the 3 year service plan. Since it's Dell, we'll probably need that. ;-) Price Reduction Since it was over $2700, Dell took...