Upgrades are afoot..

First, a week ago this blog was upgraded; now it's powered by the latest-and-greatest Nanoblogger 3.4. No real visible changes, but that was kind of the point.

But that's just a sideshow of the big changes going on behind the scenes. shaft, the server that powers this blog, and pizzahut, the server that drives my home's internal network and my photo site, are being merged into one server. This is long overdue, as the hardware is a full three generations old now.

Shaft's current hardware has been in 24/7 use for just under seven years, albeit with two blown power supplies, two dead fans, and a motherboard swap to enable a full gig of RAM to be utilized. It's a P3-1GHz, 1GiB RAM, and a pair of 40GB drives in a RAID1 configuration. And it JustWorks(tm).

Pizzahut, on the other hand, isn't quite as old but it's a bit of a Frankenstein; its importance has steadily grown since my photos have taken on a life of their own, and its upgrades have reflected that. It is a dual P3-1266MHz, 3.5GiB ECC RAM, and 4x250GB and 4x200GB drives in two RAID5 arrays plugged into a 3Ware 7506-8 card. Plus an ancient 18GB SCSI drive that I purchased used in 2000 that serves as the root/OS drive. And I pound the hell out of it on a daily basis.

Last night, Phase I of my server upgrades was completed successfully. the old RAID arrays and their controller were replaced with a 4x1TB RAID5 arrangement, plugged into a new 3Ware 9550SXU-8LP card. The usable disk space shot up from 1249GB (20GB free) to 2751GB. When this fills up (by the time I'm done restoring stuff shifted to offline storage I should have about 1TB free), I can just drop in another 4 drives to create another ginormous array.

Phase Ia comes next. The ancient SCSI OS disk in pizzahut should be replaced with something newer (and faster!); I have 1x160, 2x200, and 6x250 drives lying around now. This may not happen, depending on the timetable for Phase II.

Phase II involves the new motherboard/processor/etc for what will become the new unified server. I haven't decided on the final configuration, but it'll be a server-class motherboard with PCI-X (for the RAID card), 8GiB or more RAM, dual GigE, and a modern quad-core CPU. Each of the cores will pack more oomph than all three of the old CPUs combined, and there are four cores to play with. What I buy, and when, depends entirely on finances. If I get more donations (hint hint) I'll be able to buy a bigger box, sooner.

Current leanings: Asus M2N-LR + AMD Phenom II X4 940 (Shanghai), or Supermicro MBD-X7SBE + Intel Q9400 (Yorkfield). The latter will run about $60 more. Of course, more money can be spent for additional CPU oomph, funds permitting.. Speaking of funds, this phase, as spec'd, will run about $700 with the new case, power supply, and other misc bits. Maybe a bit more for a UPS that can handle the load.

Phase III will be to migrate ShaftNet's services onto the new box. What form this takes place is yet to be determined; I'd like to keep my internal network services separate from the external ones.

Frankly, as ancient as shaft's current hardware is, it's wholly adequate for what it does. This upgrade is being driven by the needs of my photography, primarily on the disk space front but having more (and faster) CPU cores for image processing will make a hell of a difference. Piggybacking shaft's services onto this box will effectively be free.

At this point, the biggest question I face is what to name the new box -- shaft, pizzahut, or something new?

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