Smart Cookie Dad » Computing

Moving Servers to a New Home

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:38:46 +0000

My company is trying to save money so we are moving off of renting servers to buying our own servers and host them ourselves in a co-location space. It was a quite stressful process from drafting machine specs to putting servers together and installing them at the data center. It took me a month to decide on all the parts to buy, 2 days to put the servers together and 2 days to install them at the data center. Why 2 days to install them at the data center? That’s because the rails (Antec 20″ rackmounting side rails) I bought weren’t really made for 1U servers. They are too tall (wide) to stack on top of each other. I believe these rails are probably made for 2U. The rails itself is very solid though. Here is what the rails look like:

We were juggling on our first day at the data center moving servers around trying to fit them in without wasting space. Basically, in order to fit this rails, we need to skip one nut on the rack. Which means, we would loose 1U for every 3 servers. That kinda defeat the purpose of purchasing 1U cases. We ended up only using two of these rails and stack 5 machines on top of a set of rails. This rails is very well built and it hold up very well. We are shopping for 1U rails now to refit the machines once we receive new rails.

Here is a couple pictures of what our rack look like:

Front of the servers on a rack

Back of the servers on a rack

Lexmark C543 Review

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:15:08 +0000

I just purchased this low-cost laser printer for work for less than $300. I have to say most of the reviews I read about this printer is true. It’s slow on startup (about a minute) and noisy when printing but print quality is excellent. The best part, it came with a full cartridge set instead of a starter pack. The cartridge set would cost a couple hundred dollars alone. You can’t really go wrong with this printer for the price.

One thing of warning though. The print server on this printer is wide open by default and the FTP port is also opened (you can print stuffs by ftping stuffs to the ftp port). I would suggest disabling FTP and set up a password if you are on a shared network in case some deadbeats may discover the FTP port and start dumping stuffs there for backup.

OCZ 60GB Solid State Drive Cheap

admin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:40:46 +0000

Amazon now has a sale on this drive now for $141.99 with free shipping and a $40 rebate which comes down to $101.99. This is a very good price for a SSD. Reviews are a little mixed though. Some people said the drive sometimes hangs for a couple second with heavy use. It’s a probably a firmware issue that can be fixed with upcoming updates. It’s actually not too bad if you put it in a laptop that’s mostly used for web browsing. The improved reliability (vs hard drive crashing) should outweighs the occasional glitches. General consensus is that this drive perform quite well compare to a regular hard disk. I’m very tempted to order this drive now before the sale and rebate is over.

OCZ OCZSSD2-1SLD60G Solid Series SATA2 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive