Temporary Office Server

[Rob]

My office's Dell Server has gone to meet it's maker after 5 years valiant service. The fans whirr away, but that's about it. no beep, no screen output, no flashing lights that it's reading stuff from the RAID SCSI drives.

So whilst we head out to spec and order the new box we had started to think about, but not really sort out, I have to get a temporary box in place as the proper box will take a little while to order, configure, etc.

So the idea is to use the next best PC available. Basically that is going to be one of my home PCs and I'd prefer to avoid giving up my main gaming rig.

Does anyone have any idea how a dual cored and hyperthreaded Xeon 2.8GHz 2MB Cache, 800FSB would compare to a Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz 4MB cache 1066MHz FSB? Is the faster speed of the E6600 going to sort of balance the lack of hyperthreading?

[mark1234]

Entirely depends what this server spends its time doing.

[Rob]

Mostly file server, bit of active director and print server stuff, with SQL thrown in. It's Small Business Server 2003 R2 for 20 users. Exchange isn't used as that migrated to the cloud a while ago.

[berkut]

SBS2003 will run fine on the Core 2 Duo...2-3GB RAM would be ideal to have but it will survive on 1GB RAM.

[Rob]

Thanks. I was hoping someone would confirm I wasn't being daft.

I've managed to get 4GB of RAM onto the PC now, (2 x 2GB DDR2 which should be fine) but oddly the Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, is only allocating 3200MB of that to the OS (in the BIOS which is current, so it's not windows doing something weird) and the BIOS suggests that something is "appropriating" the rest Still it's probablynot a biggie since Windows 2003 can only use 4GB RAM at best.

[DocDutch]

The problem you will have rob is getting the data of the raid

[DaiNasty]

Good point, although hopefully there's a recent NAS backup or equivalent.

[Rob]

After poking around, a lot, and with a brainwave in the very small hours of this morning, I wondered if I'd somehow unseated something critical as I'd been messing around before the total failure trying to work out why a hard disk wasn't been seen. Somehow I'd disturbed the CPU seating, maybe just a pin or two wasn't making contact - the inside of the case was black with dirt so who knows what debris was in the way. Stripped everything out, including fully reseating the CPU with new thermal compound and the server has rebooted. Phew.

Still don't know why it can't see some of the hard disks, especially the USB stuff we used for backups. Still at least I have a working server again, and can at least run some sort of backup over the network so we aren't in quite the same level of vulnerability.

[mark1234]

Glad you've got the server working again. I strongly suggest that now is the time to get a new machine in place.

The old one is five years old, has died once, it's only a matter of time before it happens again. Get a new one now, preferably two so that you're not left with an unplanned outage.

[Rob]

Yep we know the server is end of life. We've been looking at replacement options especially as we've also been hitting storage capacity problems. Realistically it's not the hardware that is the cost or concern, it's the operating system licences that become extortionate. Some one has to pay Mr Gate's pension I suppose.

But to buy two servers is a luxury we can't really justify. Small Business Server should all run on one box. But redundancy is always a challenge. Most issues aren't hardware, but software configuration caused by changes we try to make over the network. Indeed in 5 years this is the first hardware problem. We'll probably just ensure the replacement server has a good level of on site response, perhaps 4 hours.

[DocDutch]

and not giving MGP server admin access on it really

[Rob]

Thanks for that vote of no confidence in my inabilities.

[Ramrod]

What can I say? We know you

[Rob]

Time for me to slink off under a rock somewhere

[Ramrod]

.........I shouldn't talk though......I can destroy mobile phones with a text