Geek Central
As my vacation comes to a close I’ve been busy trying to finish up some of the house projects on my list. One of them was organizing my mess of a server room. I bought that rack for $40 at Home Depot and while it is a little shallow I’m not going to complain. I still have to size the CAT5 cables but that will have to wait for now. I wish I had remembered to take a before photograph - this is just so much better.
Geek Details:
These four computers plug into a Belkin OmniView SE 4-port KVM hooked up to one mouse, keyboard and Hitachi SuperScan 812 21″ monitor. The router is an SMC Barricade 8 Port.
Gold
AMD Athlon XP 1500 1.3GHz
1.5GB RAM
Windows XP
Platinum
AMD Duron 1.3GHz
512MB RAM
Windows 2000
Silver
Intel Celeron 466MHz
384MB RAM
Windows 2000
Bronze
AMD Duron 900MHz
256MB RAM
Mandrake Linux 9.0
These two computers are hooked into the network but are upstairs in the kitchen and Amy’s office:
Brass
AMD Duron 750MHz
512MB RAM
Windows 2000
Copper
AMD Duron 750MHz
512MB RAM
Windows 2000
To answer the obvious question. No, nobody needs this many computers.
Why not go nuts and purchase VMWare’s Workstation product, creating 2-3 virtual machines on each box? I’ve got my home machine running three Windows 2000 virtual machines on top of a Debian Linux box (Athlon XP 2200, 512 MB RAM, 60GB IDE HD).
Hmmmm….very interesting…Maybe you could do what Henry said, or you could build yourself a unit. Shouldn’t be that hard. I dont even know the first thing about building anything and here I am giving out advice ( go figure!!!) he he he
We use VMWare at work but it hadn’t occured to me to look into a home license - I just may do that! Although it really is amazing how cheap it is to build a computer right now, the last couple I bought I got for about $225 which was for case, floppy, cd, motherboard, cpu and memory. Throw in a few old hard drives and attach to existing peripherals and away you go.
A word to the wise — I haven’t used VMWare in years, but be careful with Partition Magic 7.0. I used it *correctly*, and my partition (RH 7.3/WinXP) got corrupted a few days later. I had to wipe my hard drive and reinstall from CD. It was an unpleasant experience, though not as time-consuming as I feared.
Incidentally, the first question out of the Dell Customer Support lady’s mouth, once I read the error message to her, was “Have you installed Partition Magic 7.0 or [some other product I forget]?”, so it’s presumably not an uncommon problem.
VMWare might be safer, but with that many computers — don’t forget to back uOften. Hopefully you’ve got a ZIP drive/tape backup on that rack somewhere.
Joe
P.S. That looks like it’s just begging for your cats to climb all over it.
most of your servers are with amd-cpu. Are the working stable for long time? No problems with the vanīs?