I owe Gregg a keg :: Mike Neir's Page

Yep, you heard me right. A keg. Earlier this week, Gregg, a buddy from work and all an around good guy, gave me a nice gift in the form of a new machine that has now become my webserver. I mostly-jokiingly bugged him for a while to give me the machine, since he had also received it at no cost, and I guess he finally bought into my bullshit. Therefore, I feel that I owe him one. He's got a kegerator in his basement, so I told him to let me know when his current keg is empty. I'll be picking up the cost on the next one.

The machine is a pretty significant upgrade from what my webserver was before. The old box was powered by dual Pentium III 500MHz processors, with 512MB of RAM, a couple of 9GB SCSI-2 drives for the system stuff, and a couple of 80GB IDE drives for user data and backups. The new box has dual Pentium III's running at 1400MHz, 2GB of RAM, and two 18GB SCSI-3 drives in a hot-swappable enclosure, and redundant power supplies. This machine is designed to be a server, not just a generic computer acting as one. It's also designed to be more massive than your average Volkswagen, apparently. It weighs 50 pounds easily, probably more. I've got the two 18GB drives set up in RAID1, which should make disk reads faster, while providing some data redundancy for the system files. I also moved one of the 9GB drives over, and both of the 80GB drives. I'm not sure what purpose the 9GB drive will have, but the 80GB drives are serving their old purpose in the new machine.

My website itself isn't noticibly faster, since I have my code optimized to a decent degree, but the gallery is a lot faster. I've lamented over the speed of Gallery2 in the past, and having more horsepower makes that a bit more bearable. The processing of uploaded images should be a good measure faster now as well.

Shelby :: 06/16/2006, 1:15 am :: Reply

Can I have your old dual 500? .. purrrrdy please. I feel you owe me.

AG :: 06/16/2006, 6:30 am :: Reply

You still owe me a walk in the park.

Mike Neir :: 06/16/2006, 10:33 am :: Reply

I'm still working on that.

Michael :: 06/16/2006, 9:26 am :: Reply

I'll take your old box. hehe

Not sure if dual PIIs would be better than my single P3 though.

Matt :: 06/16/2006, 2:35 pm :: Reply

Unless my eyes are tricking me, his old box was dual P3's.

Mike Neir :: 06/16/2006, 2:46 pm :: Reply

Michael was saying that his single Pentium 3 might have more horsepower than my old dual P3 machine.

Matt :: 06/16/2006, 2:57 pm :: Reply

Aye. So what are you going to do with it?

Mike Neir :: 06/16/2006, 3:06 pm :: Reply

I don't know... it's at home holding down my kitchen table at the moment.

Steve J :: 06/16/2006, 8:44 pm :: Reply

I want my dual PIIIs back you thief!! Some might say you bought them off me, but I say I LOANED them to you... you are SO past due...

Mike Neir :: 06/16/2006, 11:41 pm :: Reply

You are one funny dude.

Ben :: 06/20/2006, 11:14 am :: Reply

Darn Gregg, an all around good guy.

If I had known he was going to give up that server so easily, I would have pestered him!

Mike Neir :: 06/20/2006, 9:51 pm :: Reply

Man, I pestered him for like, three weeks. Easy my ass.