It’s alive!
I’ve finally decommissioned a server that has served me well for over 5 years. WhyMobile, IABPI and Naturext were the last sites hosted on the server.
The old hefty 2U server is now sitting in my mum’s office waiting to be upgraded with a new motherboard, power supply and hard drives. It should serve well as a disk storage if configured right.
I have just racked an old Sun Netra T1 AC200 in the empty 2U space. It’s 7 years old and had a dead motherboard. I’ve just gotten a motherboard replacement off eBay to get it working again. Now with a refurbished board, 2 x 146GB SCSI LVD drives (was originally 2 x 9.1GB SCSI LVDs – pathetic storage) running Solaris 10 and ZFS, it’s ready to go again. Unleash the power of an ancient 500MHz UltraSparc III with ZFS!
Servers in Rack
The Sun Netra T1 AC200 is at the bottom of the rack. The first two silver/grey servers are production Sun X2100s running VMware. The third server in white is an OEM Asus server for development and testing. It was donated courtesy of Kelvin, and also runs VMware. The cardboard boxes contain spare disks and some other stuff… for disaster recovery.
Network and Power Cables
You can see an old 24-port Cisco 2950 switch here. It’s a workhorse. I’m thinking if I should get a spare. It’s not just a plain old switch, the servers are running tagged (or what Cisco calls “trunk”) VLANs.
Every server has dual NICs. All the servers that run VMware are configured to run the dual ports on active-standby mode for port-level HA. I haven’t figured out how to do NIC bonding in Solaris, so that’s on my to-do list, albeit low priority at the moment.