Good news, techsters!
The 2U server has been delivered, yesterday afternoon, 1 day earlier than my most recent estimate. (Specifications at the bottom of this post, after all the blah-blah-blah.)
This means that I can run memtest86 (opteron version) overnight tonight, and hand it over to the developers tomorrow.
Here is my schedule for today -
1. At 9AM I have an interview with Voice of America. That should take only 10-15 minutes.
2. After that I will be going to my office downtown to pick up various this and that (raid card for 1U server, Fedora Core 1 and 2 ISOs etc.) and heading to the colocation facility.
3. When I get to the colocation facility, I will do whatever I need to do to get 3 of the 4 1U servers online immediately -- the Wikipedia seems half dead to me this morning, I have a feeling the Yahoo feed has launched and we're getting slaughtered. Hopefully those machines can be pressed into service almost immediately to help relieve things.
4. For the "new zwinger", I will need to do whatever I need to do to get the 2x250gb RAID array with fedora core installed. I think this is going to be easy, as I already have 2 hard drives in a mirror with Fedora core all ready -- but I made these in an old machine of mine, and nothing ever works as planned with computers. :-) But once I get that going, I'll hand that one over as well.
5. The people at Silicon Mechanics gave me a full explanation of this, and after we discussed it, they went ahead and shipped the new server with *32 bit* Fedora Core 1. That's because *64* bit Fedora Core 1 would not install. But Fedora Core 2 (64 bit) *would* install, and they would have been happy to do it for me, but because they have a slow isdn line, and didn't have the ISOs yet, it was going to take them longer than it would take me, so I had them just ship it.
So this means that I will be installing Fedora Core 2 64bit.
Additionally, they set up the RAID 10 like this: 219GB HW RAID 10 (split over 2 Channels)
But James Day has convinced me that this isn't exactly what we want. I'm going to review our discussions of that, as well as discussions on the list, and then I'll also show up in IRC to make a final confirmation of what we want to do.
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Here are the specs...
Dual AMD Opteron 248 - 2.2Ghz - 1MB L2 Cache Memory: 8GB (8x1GB) PC2700 Registered ECC HDD (6): Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 73GB U320 15KRPM SCA SCSI SCSI Controller: LSI MegaRaid SCSI 320-2 - 2 Channel U320 RAID 64MB Cache w/BBU CD-ROM Floppy 460W hotswap redundant power supplies (to be place on two different circuits!)
--Jimbo