I made a new server.

[Ampera]

Might be a slight of a might off topic, but I'm actually quite happy with this server, and am bored, so why not post about it?

For the past several years, all of my server computing needs were either done on my desktop computer, in the case of NAS activities, done on a spare HTPC, in the case of my ZNC and IRC Bot (Available now, on irc.austnet.org #eevblog if the network ever stopped being DDoSed and I can get my bot back on ), and on two old IBM eServers from 2003/4. To give a scale of their age, they both have PCI-X, Ultra320 controllers, and one of them isn't even AMD64 compatible, and uses PAE to go above 4GB of RAM.

So it thought it was high time for me to build myself a new server, using as few moneys as possible because poor. To start off with, I already had a number of parts, and these included an ATX case, a 450W EVGA power supply, 1 2TB hard drive and a load of 80GB drives for use as system drives, and a GT9800 for use as a graphics card.

My budget was around 120-150USD, and I set out to make the best possible server I could for that dough. I looked on ebay, and quite luckily found a 50 dollar LGA 1366 motherboard out of an HP Z400 workstation, complete with a known working dual core Xeon, and 5GB of EEC DDR3 UDIMMs. I think this was likely the luckiest part of the build, especially so since old Westmere EP and Nehalem server CPUs go for stupid (and I mean stupid) cheap on places like Newegg. I bought a 6 core 12 thread Xeon X5650 for 24 USD and 8 dollars shipping (yeah, 8 dollars for a friggin CPU, but whatever). This chip is Westmere-EP based, with a passmark of around 7400, and a not too bad single threaded score, making it an absolute steal for the low low price. For comparison, my i7-4790k passmarks @ ~11000 (though passmark is a synthetic bench, an old one at that, and known to not be all too accurate on Intel CPUs, but enough for a ballpark figure).

To go along I bought a 35 dollar Cooler Master tower air cooler (yes my CPU cooler costs more than my CPU) and two 2TB hard drives (one for free as a gift from someone else, and another out of my own pocket).

Everything came promptly, and on Friday, I set to putting it all together. Now I'll go into detail, but before I do, I must say that this is the most complicated computer I've ever put together, and knowing Murphy's Law, things could have gone SO much worse for me.

My first issue arrived, simply because this is an OEM board from HP. I've actually have had decent luck with an OEM board in the past, which was out of a Pentium Pro Gateway machine, but that board was just a VS440FX, with a fancy BIOS. Mounting in the case worked fine, there was really only one major hole that didn't match up. I had intended to stick some wadded up paper in there to support it in one corner where it's a bit floppy floppy, but I've forgotten that, and cbf to reach in there and do that now.

The next problem was the fan header, and oh jolly boy was that a croc of shit. So the CPU fan header has 5 pins on this motherboard, with a key preventing the insertion of a normal 3 or 4 pin fan connector. The pin pitch is the exact same, but I didn't know if the pinout was the same, so I went to check the HP Z400 service manual, and that's when I found this wonder: https://prnt.sc/ms1ecm

Now, I know there are a lot of EEs on the EEVBlog forums, can someone please explain what the actual shit this is? A common person might think that there is a list of pin numbers, and a diagram of (stupidly) numbered pins. You'd be forgiven for thinking that those match up with the list on the right (although the plastic keying tab /also/ has a number on it). This is where multimeters are a good idea, and I've confirmed through continuity tests matching up the pins to various commonalities like 12V power and ground to confirm that pin 1 is on the right, and it goes from right to left (yes right to left) 1 2 3 4 5, not 2 4 1 3 5. The good news is that this is identical (save for pin 5) with a regular 3/4 pin fan header, and to get around the keying issues, I shaved off the little key flanges on the fan connector (not the header) with a knife, and just stuck it on the right pins.

That was the easy problem, the next problem had to do with the 24 pin ATX power connector /not/ being standard. the 5v and 3.3v pins on the +4 connector (not CPU power), were actually supposed to be 12v pins on this HP board, because why the hell not. I did not find this out through trial and error, and like a good boy spit my proverbial tea out when looking at the resources that the connector pinout was proprietary (literally just 2 pins). So my solution here was one I had thought of doing before, and that was transposing some of the pins in the ATX power connector, the only issue being that I needed two 12v pins I didn't have, instead of 3.3v and 5v pins. So to solve this, I manufactured my own regulating DC-DC step up converter on the spot to the exact specification to go in line with the power connector.

I am of course joking, and I just grabbed the hereso unused GPU power connectors, and stole a couple of 12v pins off that, and stuck them into the +4 connector in the right places. The difficulty here being getting the actual PSU terminals out of the ATX connector, which is done by (and I am not joking), taking two stables, straightening them into Ls, putting them to the left and right of the inset terminal, pushing down just enough to depress the internal clips, and then pulling from the base of the terminal.

Anyways, with the connectors transposed, the entire event went quite well thereon, with the board /not/ catching on fire. The only slight annoyance was me needing to swap processors a couple of times in order to upgrade the BIOS to support my newer X5650 (and the BIOS package giving me an ISO file I just burned, to find out that it wasn't bootable, and that simply dding the image to a flash drive and hitting go in the setup menu was good enough), and some spare memory I had intended to use turning out to be RDIMMs which were not supported on my board, leaving me with only 5GB of memory instead of 8GB.

For OS, I chose FreeBSD, as I quite like the operating system, it being pleasingly nice to use compared inline to my Arch Linux environment I use on my desktop. I've as of yet kitted this server out with some ZFS pools (1 2TB and 1 4TB), SFTP for mountable file storage (why even use SMB/NFS anymore, SFTP is so much nicer), and I've moved my ZNC over from my HTPC to this machine. I have lots of interesting plans for this machine, including: A PXE server, an on-demand multi-user X server working on some efficiently compressible graphical remoting system, like Xpra, or RDP, or maybe something interesting with regular X11, a future email server, among other goodies.

Now, for the tl;dr, Pictures!

Construction pictures:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/310478241989263371/551195751300988929/IMG_20190301_161810.jpg
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/310478241989263371/551195751305183234/IMG_20190301_161850.jpg
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/310478241989263371/551195752643428353/IMG_20190301_163108.jpg (I didn't end up using the Seagate drive to the right)
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/310478241989263371/551195753591209984/IMG_20190301_161918.jpg
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/310478241989263371/551195755331846174/IMG_20190301_161816.jpg

BIOS info screen:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/310478241989263371/551214867386990602/IMG_20190301_203027.jpg

My set of towers underneath my desk, the server being the tower closest to the camera:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/310478241989263371/551554447134687232/IMG_20190302_185928.jpg

The desktop I had setup, showing off all the fancy threads:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/413131780460249088/551249821126754325/C2xbzbnuqAXXAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC.png

My machine hard at work, doing some compressing:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/413131780460249088/551582926500921364/IMG_20190302_205017.png