Low Bandwidth 101

Since last summer I have been steadily working on rebuilding my lab while attempting some semblance of power efficiency.
While I would have loved to have built the storage server NAS Brian Moses did it's definitely out of my budget.

So what am I cobbling together instead?
Primary Storage Node - Media files, etc
Rackable Systems 3U server
- 12 how-swap bay 3U Short Depth Chassis
- 450W Rackables Power Supply
- Intel S5000PSL Motherboard
- 1x Intel Xeon L5310 1.6GHz Quad-Core
- 8x 1G DDR2-ECC FB-DIMMS
- LSI 8-port SAS 6 PCIE Controller
- 4x 2TB Hitachi 7200RPM SATA Drives
- 1x 4GB SATA Flash disk
- 1x 40GB 2.5" 5400RPM Sata Hard drive
Secondary Storage Node - Virtual Machine Storage
Rackable Systems 2U Server
- 4 hot-swap bay 2U Short Depth Chassis
- 450W Rackables Power Supply
- Intel S5000PSL Motherboard
- 1x Intel Xeon L5310 1.6GHz Quad-Core
- 8x 1G DDR2-ECC FB-DIMMS
- Intel Dual-port PCI-E NIC
- 4x 1TB Western Digital RE2 drives
- 1x 4GB SATA Flash disk
- 1x 40GB 2.5" 5400RPM Sata Hard drive
Virtual Machine Host
HP Proliant DL585 G2 (pdf)
- 4x Dual-Core AMD Operon 8220s
- 64GB DDR2 ECC RAM
- 2x Intel Dual-port gigabit PCI-X NICs
- Random 2GB Flash drive
- Redundant power Supplies
Networking
HP Procurve 2824

Software
Both storage nodes are currently running CentOS 7 combined with ZFS on linux. The Virtual host is running VMWare ESXi 5.5

So far other than swearing at firewalld, finding a bug and some update teething, things have not gone too bad so far. This is still a bit of a work in progress (rebuilding the VM storage node for more space, etc), and I figured for once I might post online how I am building things out, to either help others or serve as a warning to the rest of the internet

Since I was dragged from the East Coast by my employer, I've started to refurbish and redo a number of the computers I have. Partially because I have to pay the power bill now, partially because some of them I have simply outgrown.
( Pictures and explanations behind the cut... )

Dear Ebay sellers,

There is a substantial difference between PCI-E (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCIE) and PCI-X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X), so much so that one will not work with the other. Please watch your wording so when poor folks like me who are looking for a PCI-X graphics card don't get their hopes up over a mislabeled PCI-E card.

Thanks,

Imagechan and Stumble are bad for productivity.
However, Pandora is a great way to listen to music.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/380355/become_the_system_user/

at [time] /interactive "cmd.exe"

BWA HA HA!

Its 0150, i'm wide awake, the fan in my external HDD is dying and earlier tonight I installed windows 98 on my athlon64 PC just so I could copy the damned files off my XPPro cd onto the hard disk so I could do a custom install. All of this because XP decided to f' up hardcore and BSOD on every freaking boot after I fixed the drivers for my zip drive. So now I am half asleep/really wide awake, waiting for XP to install. Oh and my tower was powering to off for no apparent reason. :S

And I stil;l have a lot of work to do before school lets out and a lot of investigating to do as to what the hell may happen if this semester ends on the particularly crappy note I think it is.

...