The Case

When it came to choosing a case, I thought I had it all covered. Thanks to a donation from Rackmount.com, I had a choice between a nice 2U case, and an even nicer 1U case. Each case had benefits and drawbacks. The 2U case has hot-swappable fans, three 3.5" bays (and a single 5.25" bay) and a 300W power supply. On top of that, it also allows for two PCI slots via riser cards. The 1U, on the other hand, has two 3.5" bays (and a single 5.25" bay), a 250W power supply and only a single PCI slot via riser. The thing that originally turned my attention more towards the 1U was the fact that it has SCA backplanes, allowing for hot-swappable SCSI hard drives.

I decided on the 1U as the case for our server, but as I quickly found out, that would limit some of my other choices.

The Controller

We were pretty set in the idea that we needed RAID, and none of us (Jim, Upaboveit and I) were convinced that any of the IDE RAID controllers currently available were ready for prime-time duty in our *nix server... That left SCSI. I also wanted to make sure that our controller had good support in our choice of OS, so I did a little research and then I got in touch with the good folks over at Adaptec and explained our plight. They heard our cry and sent over two controllers for us to try.

As I mentioned before, the Thunder LE-T supports Adaptec's Zero Channel RAID (ZCR) technology. If you're not familiar with how that works, it basically adds RAID functionality to your onboard SCSI controller, in our case, via a PCI add-in card. That being said, Adaptec's 2000S (ZCR controller) was my first choice.

When I installed the 2000S in the machine, or tried to install it anyway, I found out the first drawback to a 1U case. Yes, the 1U allowed us a single PCI slot by using a riser card. In our case though, it was the wrong PCI slot. You see, in order for the ZCR to function, the add-in card has to be in a specific PCI slot. The PCI slot we needed wasn't the one we got to use. The way the case and riser card is setup, you have no choice as to which PCI slot you get to use in the case and ours was the wrong one (see the picture above and to the right to see what I mean)... Strike one. Next?

Luckily I had the foresight to ask Adaptec about providing one of their 2110S cards as well. The 2110S is a 64bit 66mhz single channel U160 RAID controller with 48mb cache onboard. For our needs it's plenty, and since it cares not which PCI slot it runs in, our riser situation was no problem.

The Drives

The choice of drives for our server was quite possibly the most frustrating part of building the box. I actually had a nice pair of U160, 10k Cheetahs thanks to Seagate, but my drives were 68pin. In order to use the backplanes and have hot-swappability, I needed 80pin drives. We put out the call and another kind reader tried to hook us up with a pair of 80pin Cheetahs, but unfortunately, that didn't pan out.

After a week of looking and trying to scrape together some money, I decided that it would have to be a pair of 68pin Cheetahs for our server. With the datacenter being located half way accross the country from me, I -really- wanted hot-swappable drives in the box, but money pressures and time tables were looming so I went with what I had. I set the pair of 18gb drives up in a nice redundant RAID1 set and the server, at least from a hardware standpoint, was ready to roll.

Hardware Conclusions

Hind-sight is always 20/20, and looking back, there are a few things I would do differently if I was to start over. All-in-all though, I think we wound-up with one helluva webserver. The only thing we are missing is an automatic back-up. One kind reader donated a nice DAT drive for us to use but due to space constraints in the case, and problems with tape rotation (from hundreds of miles away) we opted not to put it in the machine. Instead, Jim and I will be playing with some remote back-up options and I will store them on tape here at home eventually. It's not the best option, but it works.

With all of the muscle in the box I expect the first limit we hit in the future will be disk related. Whether that is disk space or disk speed remains to be seen. If/when we hit that limit the 2110S has us covered with it's support for 15 devices on its single channel, and with its external port. If we need more disk space or speed, we can add an external array of bigger/faster disks to supplement our existing drives and all it would require is a single reboot at most.

To be honest, I don't really ever see us upgrading this machine at all. By the time we start to see its limits, there will be something newer, nicer and 20x faster to replace it with and this one will be dedicated to something really taxing like log parsing and email serving. At the pace of today's technology, servers like this are almost disposable.

My Job Here is Done

Once I got the hardware assembled and running, I installed the OS of Jim's choice and got it online for him to access remotely. Once he could access the machine, I stepped away and let the man work his magic. So, without further ado, here is Jim to explain what he chose and why he chose it...