Blog @ simpletofind.ca » tech http://blog.simpletofind.ca A place that is simple to find, but not really specific about anything... Sun, 29 May 2011 23:26:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Please welcome a new server to this world… http://blog.simpletofind.ca/2008/02/12/please-welcome-a-new-server-to-this-world%e2%80%a6/ http://blog.simpletofind.ca/2008/02/12/please-welcome-a-new-server-to-this-world%e2%80%a6/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:20:52 +0000 daniel http://blog.simpletofind.ca/2008/02/12/please-welcome-a-new-server-to-this-world%e2%80%a6/ I’m proud to announce I brought up a new server.   As always, this is a remote, geeky, for the hell of it type of server.  It is self sufficient, requiring no external help “per se”.   The server is powered by a bank of golf cart batteries, 6 of them to be exact, in series and parallel, giving me 12 volts.  From there, we have a 480 Watt inverter.  Quick tests/math guesses give me 25-32 hours of power without any external sources.  To recharge the batteries, I have a 500 Watt turbine connected directly to the batteries.  The turbine has a built-in overcharge unit to keep from killing the batteries.  The server runs idly at around 58 Watts and 190 Watts at full load.  I had to use an external video card because the onboard card added an extra 12 Watts (vs 2 Watts for an older ATI card).  The CPU was declocked 12% and that saved another 2-14 Watts (depending on load).  For internet access, I am currently using an RJ45 cable running over the side of an apartment building to a cable modem running with a 20 meg connection and no blocked ports!  I am building 2 cantenna’s as we speak, so it will be upgraded to a 108MB wireless connection tomorrow or the day after.  So, it will be an almost 100% self reliant server!  The cost of the turbine was totally not worth the electricity savings; but the geek factor makes it all so special!

What do I plan to do with this server?  I have no idea.  I put in 1TB of storage on a RAID 10, 4x500GB drives, SATA2.  There is about 2GB of ram and it is running Windows 2003 Server as its host and VMWare server running another Windows 2003 Server and Debian J  I will most likely use it as a form of storage and offload my web traffic on it when my other servers are overloaded. 

Nothing like hosting your own backup solution, just need to upgrade my encryption algorithm:  3DES (encrypt/decrypt/encrypt, 1 KEY).

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