Well, I finally replaced the the 10+ year-old SuperMicro motherboard and dual Pentium III processors in my file server.

It's hard locked twice in the last month, so I figured I'd give it some modern hardware:

• Intel DP43BF motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @ 2.93GHz
• Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) PC3-8500 SDRAM
• EVGA GeForce 210

Yes, the video card is overkill, but it was only $40, and the other Intel motherboards with onboard video were a bit more expensive.

Normally, this wouldn't warrant a blog entry, but I think I just upgraded the oldest computer (motherboard, CPU, memory) I've ever owned.  Let's take a trip down memory lane…

History of the P6DBU

Back in the summer of 2000, high school graduation presents and other things gave me a few dollars to spend on new computer equipment that I could take with me to RPI in the fall.

I ended up picking up a full-height SuperMicro case, motherboard, and processors.  The motherboard was the SuperMicro P6DBU Intel 440BX and the processors were 2x Intel Pentium III 800MHz units w/the coppermine cores.  It was hot stuff back then, let me tell you.  I forget how much memory the system started off with, but it was at least 256MB.

Here's the earliest photo I could find of the system (sorry, Sony Mavica quality):

The P6DBU board was a server motherboard, and had an Ultra2 SCSI controller on-board.  For awhile I ran a Western Digital 10k RPM SCSI hard disk, but that eventually accumulated a host of bad sectors, and was way too loud, for some reason.

The SuperMicro case was really huge.  It was pretty bulky, too, and designed fairly badly.  My roommate back in my freshman year at RPI ended up purchasing the same case, and hating it as well.  Oh well.

The machine [named taco] started out with Windows 2000.  Back then I knew nothing about FOSS, Linux, or much else, actually.  I think the most CPU-insitive application I ran was Quake III Arena (and I was fairly good, for a time).

In 2003 (I think) the machine was upgraded to Windows XP and eventually made its way up to 1GB of [ECC] RAM, the maximum the board could take.  Along the way, some of the RAM went bad, and needed to be replaced.  I think this is when I replaced it all with Crucial memory.  For some reason I took a photo of the memory replacement in-progress:

In 2004, after graduating from RPI, I repurposed the machine as a file server running Debian GNU/Linux in the basement of my parents' house in New Jersey.  I renamed it atlantis (for no apparent reason) and threw a few miscellaneous hard disks in a JBOD setup with Linux's LVM.  According to IRC logs, the JBOD size started at 720GB (2x 120GB, 1x 400GB, and 1x 80GB).  Here's what it looked like back then:

When I moved to Charlotte in 2005, the machine came with me, retaining its role along with the addition of DHCP and DNS servers (and later Asterisk PBX).

In August of 2006, I shuffled around the JBOD to provide 1520GB of storage by adding and replacing some disks.  In March of 2008 I decided that JBOD was probably a bad idea, and picked up 3x 1TB WD disks, to replace the JBOD with some RAID-5 (w/LVM on top).  Unfortunately, during the upgrade, the JBOD died.  Here's me whining on IRC about it:

2008-03-30T12:11:47 -0400 < prox> Nice. My JBOD array just blew up.
2008-03-30T12:11:52 -0400 < prox> There goes 668GiB1
2008-03-30T12:13:32 -0400 < prox> Time for some LVM on top of RAID-5.
2008-03-30T12:19:22 -0400 < silencer> aw
2008-03-30T12:21:40 -0400 < prox> Yeah, and it died just as I was decommissioning it.
2008-03-30T12:22:08 -0400 < prox> Got 3x 1TB WD disks, and was copying stuff from the old array, and then _bewm_.
2008-03-30T12:23:53 -0400 < bleh> What huh how?
2008-03-30T12:24:08 -0400 < bleh> Oh, the old one.
2008-03-30T12:24:16 -0400 < bleh> Eek.
2008-03-30T12:24:38 -0400 < prox> The old array consists of: 1x 120GB, 1x 250GB, 1x 400GB, and 1x 750GB.
2008-03-30T12:24:40 -0400 < prox> The 400GB died.

I had to restore lots of stuff from optical backups, some of which didn't work.  I lost quite a bit of TV shows.  At least the new array would be redundant (and is still functioning).

Around that same time, I upgraded the case and power supply in atlantis to some Antec hardware with some nifty new blue LEDs:

Fast forward to the present, now the P6DBU is desommissioned, and maybe the motherboard and processors will make their way to my living room.  I still have the original SuperMicro case in the closet.  It's in great condition!  I suppose I'll have to bring it to a recycling place, soon.

Anyway, thought I'd share that.  The P6DBU, processors, and memory lasted over 10 years!  Interestingly enough, the motherboard was manufactured in the United States!  I bet that's hard to find these days.

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