Afternoon geek report
2005-05-08 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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flower_cat and the kids went out shopping after brunch, leaving me free to do some long-needed (well, ... long-wanted, anyway) hardware maintenance:
First order of business was swapping some motherboards and cases around. There were two Antec cases, one (2650BQE) very quiet, with a door over the drives, and one (1650B) fairly quiet, with no door. I had put the 500MHz CPU and motherboard from the old bedroom machine (Aardvark) into the 2650, with the plan of turning it into the new gateway machine. I also had the dual-boot office machine (Tatooine), also with a 500MHz CPU and motherboard. I wanted to put this into the 1650, which would make it quieter (and also cooler-looking, but we won't go into that). Simple, right? Take everything out of Tatooine, put it in the 1650, and we're done.
Wrong: Tatooine's MB had built-in sound; Aardvark had a Creative Soundblaster Live Platinum, near the high end of consumer-grade sound, that would have been totally wasted in the gateway server. Add to that the fact that the built-in sound would save a slot on the gateway, so I could add more ethernet ports, maybe a SCSI card, and maybe a phone interface for VoIP.
OK, so what we actually do is take Aardvark's MB out of the 2650 case and move it to the 1650, and take Tatooine's MB and put it in the 2650 (after dusting it off completely), along with Aardvark's sound card and Tatooine's video and ethernet cards, and its CD and hard drives. Oh, and upgrade Tatooine (while I'm dissecting Aardvark and doing the dishes) to Win98SE to give it a better chance of recognizing new USB devices. Finish the "new" Tatooine off with a spare swappable HD box (so I can use it for backups and so on), and boot it. After the usual Windows runaround to load drivers for the new sound card, it works perfectly. Nice and quiet, except for the CD drive, which is still noisy (but only when it's spinning -- could be worse).
Stick a $7 AGP video card into what's going to be the gateway. Plug it in and fire it up. Nothing. Duh -- it helps if you plug the power supply into the motherboard. Works. Needs a new CPU fan; the old one's dying very noisily. But it works -- happy geek-bear.
Next step: replace the fan, add a few more ethernet ports, configure it, and we're good to go. Then upgrade the main server, Nova: 450MHz is pretty wimpy if you want to run VoIP and streaming audio reliably. Next week, perhaps.
flower_cat and the kids went out shopping after brunch, leaving me free to do some long-needed (well, ... long-wanted, anyway) hardware maintenance:First order of business was swapping some motherboards and cases around. There were two Antec cases, one (2650BQE) very quiet, with a door over the drives, and one (1650B) fairly quiet, with no door. I had put the 500MHz CPU and motherboard from the old bedroom machine (Aardvark) into the 2650, with the plan of turning it into the new gateway machine. I also had the dual-boot office machine (Tatooine), also with a 500MHz CPU and motherboard. I wanted to put this into the 1650, which would make it quieter (and also cooler-looking, but we won't go into that). Simple, right? Take everything out of Tatooine, put it in the 1650, and we're done.
Wrong: Tatooine's MB had built-in sound; Aardvark had a Creative Soundblaster Live Platinum, near the high end of consumer-grade sound, that would have been totally wasted in the gateway server. Add to that the fact that the built-in sound would save a slot on the gateway, so I could add more ethernet ports, maybe a SCSI card, and maybe a phone interface for VoIP.
OK, so what we actually do is take Aardvark's MB out of the 2650 case and move it to the 1650, and take Tatooine's MB and put it in the 2650 (after dusting it off completely), along with Aardvark's sound card and Tatooine's video and ethernet cards, and its CD and hard drives. Oh, and upgrade Tatooine (while I'm dissecting Aardvark and doing the dishes) to Win98SE to give it a better chance of recognizing new USB devices. Finish the "new" Tatooine off with a spare swappable HD box (so I can use it for backups and so on), and boot it. After the usual Windows runaround to load drivers for the new sound card, it works perfectly. Nice and quiet, except for the CD drive, which is still noisy (but only when it's spinning -- could be worse).
Stick a $7 AGP video card into what's going to be the gateway. Plug it in and fire it up. Nothing. Duh -- it helps if you plug the power supply into the motherboard. Works. Needs a new CPU fan; the old one's dying very noisily. But it works -- happy geek-bear.
Next step: replace the fan, add a few more ethernet ports, configure it, and we're good to go. Then upgrade the main server, Nova: 450MHz is pretty wimpy if you want to run VoIP and streaming audio reliably. Next week, perhaps.