The site was down for two days. You may have noticed the errors. Y’see, what happened is that I got a package via FedEx. New stuff doesn’t combine well with my inborn need for instant gratification (Thank you, Internet Age). The package contained a motherboard (Asus M2V) and CPU (AMD Athalon 64 4200+ Dual-Core; what a great deal for $200). Thusly, I tore into the new hardware like a rabid wildebeast tears into a baby fawn. I started flinging cards and fans at the cases hoping they would fall in so perfect a manner they would slip into the slots and mounting brackets, screwing themselves in and installing their own drivers in the process.Okay, not really, but I did approach the project with quite the zeal factor. Blister-wrap was strewn across the room like tinsel on a Christmas tree that was decorated a tinsel grenade.

The existing workstation/server was thusly split in two (A workstation and a server). The server got eight HDDs (2.5TB), the new mobo and CPU, 2GB DDR2 RAM, the cool case, a buttload of fans. The workstation got three videocards, six monitors, 1GB DDR RAM, a Gigabit NIC and a small 120GB HDD. The server didn’t get a Gigabit NIC because the mobo has one on-board.

The server has absorbed, as you might assume, all server functions: Domain controller, file/IIS/SQL/DNS/WINS server. Plus we added a super-cool new VPN server. No, you can’t have an account. The workstation has absorbed the non-server portion of my tasks. That is to say, it’s the station I work at. The six-screen multimon setup is Über. W00t for having three Radeons!

Immediately after the several-hour-long process of installing and configuring the server’s hardware, it underwent an equally painstaking several-hour-long update process. SP1 was installed for the W2K3 install. IIS, AD, and other servitudinal paradigns were configured. Somehow, after all this, it started throwing STOP errors. BSOD’s are bad on servers. I suppose the ironic part is that the server is less reliable than the old system was, and the dedicated server was assembled for the increased reliability.

The server has a total of 19 fans, because the drives get incredibly hot (As does the Athalon 64 Dual Core CPU). Currently, it has eight HDD’s and can fit an additional seven before I have to buy another controller card. Current drives sell at 750GB, so that provides a maximum additional capacity of 5.25TB. I think I’ll be okay for awhile with the three PCI HDD controller cards already installed.

During the process of setting up the server, we took the timing to install physical labels on all the drives (which is fancy-speak for “writing on the sticky part of a Post-It, tearing it away from the remainder of the Post-It and sticking it on the back of the drive; repeat for seven additional drives”). During the process, I figured out which drive stopped working several months ago and unplugged it. Unfortunately, as the drive was securely installed by that time, I couldn’t remove it without another five minutes of work. So I left it there, kind of like a heatsink for the bordering drives.

The remaining eight drives have since been mapped to the same drive letters they had before to ensure maximum continuity; this way none of the hard-coded absolute path references will be broken. After 15 seconds of deliberation, I believe I’ll install the recently-released SQL Server 2005 SP2 on the existing SQL Server 2005 installation.