- Posted by liammclennan on May 18, 2009
Creative people sometimes like to do things the hard way. Years ago some friends and I tried to convert a Ford XD Falcon wagon into an offroad vehicle. That experiment came to an end during a late night test-drive through a vacant lot; when we collided with some scrap metal. The radiator was penetrated and the engine violated unspeakably.
My point is that we sometimes disable our common sense and do things the hard way just to prove that it can be done.
I have been wanting to setup a server in a datacentre to host my blog, subversion, email, build server etc. When I looked into it I was suprised to find that server hardware is expensive - roughly three times the price of desktop hardware. This seems to be because server hardware is not commoditised the way that PC hardware is. It also occurred to me that I have some nice desktop hardware sitting unused in my shed . Combining these two facts I decided to build Frankenserver. The goal is to retrofit a desktop PC into a cheap 2 RU server case.
Here is what I have lying around:
- an ASUS socket 775 motherboard
- a 256mb PCI express video card
- a couble of 3.5" SATA hard drives
and here is what else I need:
- a 2 RU server case.
- as much RAM as possible. The motherboard supports 8GB.
- a CPU and cooler. At least 4 cores. Clock speed is less important.
- a Quality power supply
My current plan is to host everything on the server inside virtual machines. That way I can have some redundancy without RAID by archiving nightly backups of the virtual machines. I would like to offer virtual machines to the various ALT.NET user groups to use to host their non-commercial projects and tools.
The final step is to find a good data centre to host the server. I need clean power, a network connection (preferably 100MB/s) and a reasonable allocation of bandwidth (10-100 Gb/month). Data centres I have worked with in the past are hosting shop and web 24. I am reluctant to use a data centre outside of south-east queensland because of the effort that would be involved in installation and maintenance.
Has anyone tried anything like this before? Is it a good idea? Bad idea?
