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This is my favorite time of year..... when the days get cooler, shorter and the nights get chilly and longer. I can run the systems in my office as much as I want and it only serves to warm up the house! It's that time of year when we spend more time inside and hang around our electronic hearths. There's more time to plan/build systems and 'cus there's less time expended on the yard!
We also start thinking about what we can ask for, for Christmas as well. My Computer Club students are thinking about parts that they can ask for to upgrade their systems or actually build a system. The frantic aspect of the Fall such as the beginning of school and football season is over. Everyone is in a bit of a routine now and know when they can carve out time to work on their hobbies.
For me, it means that there'll be days during Thanksgiving week and Christmas break where I can work on and in my workshop. I have a list of things that need to get built. The unspoken thing down here in Texas is that there is a limited times that these things can happen. Other than time commitments, the main limitation is the extreme heat! If you think that we could get up early or stay up late to avoid that, you've evidently never spent time here in the eastern half of our lovely state where the "H" word have nothing to do with the devil. It's all about the humidity! We actually look forward to the heat of the day to get rid of the oppressive humidity (and I don't even live in Houston)!
On the other hand, our houses don't look like this from December to March either. So, that's when we can do what we want out in the garages. If you've never done it, you should come down to Texas between November and January. The weather is absolutely spectacular, with temps ranging from mid-50s to mid-70s! Plus it tends to be dry, so virtually no snow or ice. If you've never taken your family to NASA in Houston; that would be the time. Want to go to Six Flags Over Texas, River Walk in San Antonio, Big Bend..... come on down!
So, let's take a look at some of things on my docket. One of my Computer Club students wants to do a build on the Mini-ITX form-factor. While all that is pretty straight-forward these days, we still have to deal with costs. I've helped out a number of students in the past by donating various of my old parts to their efforts and this will be no exception. While looking at Mini-ITX cases during a planning session, she decided that she like the Cooler Master Elite 120 in white. I do happen to have the black version which sits in "the closet of doom", so we'll make that into a 2-in-1 project, where we'll paint out the case as well. Some of you might remember a previous student build from a couple of years ago where we transformed an older Alienware case by doing a faux carbon fiber look on it. While that one was just huge, this one will be the opposite!
Another project in progress is the conversion of a Dell PowerEdge SC440 from an old "enterprise" box to a home machine. I have another student who is in that process which will be an excellent "case study" for Linux, FreeNAS use.
Along those same line, we'll also be doing "case studies" on the stack of about 25 ThinkPad R60s that we have down in the "Batcave". These were some of our school district's old teacher computers that we were given. They're of course quite long in the tooth these days, but are also from the Core/Core2 Duo generation so can run relatively modern OS's. These should be fun machines for the kids to take home and play with! I'm certain that, like the others, this will turn into a post of it's own. Are all my projects having to do with the students?
Here's my project! It's kind of a big one. I need to clean out, streamline, update, organize; whatever you want to call it. This is the winter that I need to get myself ready to move forward. Before, I can do that, I have to "un-hook the trailer" from a psychological sense. There'll MUCH more to come on this topic as it progresses.
When the Computer Club met this week, we had a little deviation. So, I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about it. This week, at our regular meeting time, during which we've been planning a Mini-ITX gaming build, most of the students were tied up with other activities. However, the one student who did show up is currently, my most advanced having built his own machine among other experiences. Therefore, what he wanted to learn about was the "next stage".... dabbling in servers to work with Plex, transcoding, etc. Conveniently, I have such a beast just sitting around in our computer room, a cast-off from a commercial client; a Dell PowerEdge SC440.
Granted, it's really not much of a server. Machines such as these occupied the low-end of the market back in 2006, which is why it was surplus and had been sitting in a corner of our workroom for the last year and a half! However, it turned out to be perfect for a 16 year-old looking for something to learn on. What is it? Well.... it's from the Core/Core 2 Duo generation built around an LGA-775 and Intel's 3000 chipset. That give's it the ability to run relatively modern operating systems, yet is old enough to have a wealth of cheap hardware available.
If you'll look at the SC440 motherboard, what do we see? For one, it's a full-on server board.... but cut down on features to some degree. No SCSI or SAS controller. One CPU socket. But critically, it does have the ability to take Xeon processors, and ECC RAM. There are also 3 PCIe (x8, x4, x1) and 2 32-bit PCI expansion slots. This gives the machine great latitude to accessing a WIDE variety of cards to do just about anything the owner might want for cheap. It's main weakness?
If you look closely at this image, you'll see that there are just 2 dedicated bays for 3.5" hard disk drives. However, there are 2, 5.25" optical drive bays which can be made use of, plus a 3.5" "floppy" bay, which could be used as well. Although, there are only 4 SATA headers on the MB, it seems unlikely that someone would need more with this box!
I must say though, that for a baby sys-admin looking to learn; I couldn't think of a more ideal machine. Although, it's hard to tell from pictures, this thing is solid steel! He's not going to break it! It can take serious hardware. Software for the most part is free, ranging from the ubiquitous Ubuntu, to FreeNAS to more obscure distros. Upgrade parts are cheap! And best of all..... it's free!
