I bought an eVGA Nforce4 SLI motherboard a few years ago: nice board, socket 939 and was my main system until I upgraded to Core 2 Duo. Sold my old Athlon 64 x2 4400+ but had the motherboard lying around, along with the 2x 1 GB Pc3200 DIMMs. No real use until I picked up a cheap socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 3800+ and decided to build a secondary gaming system.
Once I had the system up and running I remembered the horrible fan noise from the chipset fan. …

Back in the day it was clear what a server motherboard was: it has two CPU sockets, onboard SCSI, onboard NIC, 64 bit PCI (later PCI-X) slots, extended ATX form factor and lots of fan headers.  You needed a server motherboard to take advantage of those high bandwidth PCI slots, because you couldn’t get them on a regular motherboard.  Same with the second CPU: for serious computing you needed two cores, and that meant two physical processors.
That started to change, but very slowly with the concept of a workstation motherboard that …

Lets take a look at CPU choices in the SME server environment. My big reason for getting into server systems was to have two processors in the same system. Today a server can be efficiently handled with one CPU socket and a dual or quad core processor.
Backtracking just a little, Intel and AMD create unique server class processors for motherboards with two or more CPU sockets: Intel Xeon 5000 series and AMD Opteron 2000 series. These may share common architecture with desktop chips but they will only …

The term “server” has greatly evolved over the course of computing. When I started this site in 1999 servers were dual processor systems with SCSI hardware, RAID and a very solid build. Since I’m a do it yourself kind of computer user I’ve been building my own servers for more than a decade, but lately I’ve wondered if there is any room left for “white box” or component built servers.
Poking around that crazy “interweb” shopping for SME (small to medium enterprise, just in case) servers led me to …

It’s been a few weeks since my last eWeakly, simply for the fact that I haven’t done anything computer related of interest.
Last week Microsoft released the Windows Home Server Community Technology Preview (CTP).  This put a lot more fit and finish to the product.  I used the upgrade option to upgrade my existing WHS beta 2 installation.  Things went well, but I was still getting a failing service and couldn’t install the client software.  I had hoped the upgrade would resolve these two issues.
Around the same time I realized my …

The great server upgrade took place this weekend, or to be more accurate is still taking place.  I had a lot of spare parts at home and had already built the server.  As I started to remove files from the existing server one of the three Samsung 160 GB SATA drives failed and my RAID 5 array started limping in degraded mode.
But that’s alright, as I had a spare server already set up.  A Tyan 2882-D motherboard, two Opteron 246 CPUs, four 1 GB PC2100 DDR ECC RAM, 3ware Escalade 9550SX …

It seems my friends that the CRT monitor is in fact dead.  For my day job we have many locations and buy only CRT monitors.  Everything has gone swimmingly until last week when our vendor said they couldn’t get CRT monitors for us anymore.
Before we go further let me say there’s a corporate policy to only use CRT monitors at the moment, power and space savings be damned!  I found this whole “no more CRTs” situation incredible: I still had a few running at home, although in lowly support positions …

My APC UPS problems continue ( see last week for more details ) with random reboots.  I don’t believe the battery is working at all right now.  I have a brand new APC Smart UPS 1500 Rackmount in the garage, but I’ve been hoping to sell it instead of absorbing it into the household tech.  Guess it will be pressed into service.
I posted a review of the Promise SATA300 TX4 but needed a high quality pic.  There’s a tiny picture on the Promise website but when you click “Enlarge Image” …

I was repurposing an older Xeon workstation and needed SATA ports which this particular system lacked (see eBabble Weakly for more info). There is a distinct lack of SATA rev 1.0a (with spec extensions)controller cards available, i.e. 300 MB/s connection, native command queuing, etc. Everywhere I looked I found derivatives of a Silicon Image SATA rev 1.0 controller with four ports on a 32 bit 66 MHz PCI connection. This would give a maximum throughput of 266 MB per second, which is all this motherboard would support …

At home I run a Small Business Server ( SBS ) 2003 domain and connect my PCs to it.  I’m in a corporate setting and am used to a Microsoft domain setup, so when SBS 4.5 was released many years ago I jumped onboard and have kept upgrading to the latest and greatest.  In a nutshell SBS combines Windows Server, Exchange and remote access in one nice package and adds a ton of wizards to guide you through getting set up and maintaining your environment.  With SBS 2003 the wizards …