I spend a few days last week building up and preparing a new server to replace the old pIII 800MHz machine that mecworks.com has been running on for the last several years. The machine hosts several virtual hosts, email, DNS, MySQL, and a few other services. While the pIII was holding it’s own, the hardware was old, and it could use a faster processor.

I recently upgraded my desktop by buying a Hyper-threaded p4 to replace the 2.4 GHz non-Hyper-threaded p4 that I had. OK, so now with a spare CPU on my hands I had the perfect excuse to get a new motherboard, cooling fan and a few other items to build up the new server.

I had an older rack mount case lying around, a super quiet power supply, and bought a new graphics card – a Nvidia FX 5200, which is perfect since this is a server, the card does not need to be a super graphics card and the FX 5200 does not have a fan so that makes it silent.

I got a new AOpen DVD burner, 2x512MB ram to run in dual channel mode and a new Gigabyte Technology GA-8IPE1000-G rev 3.x ATX Socket 478 Motherboard from Compusa. The hard drives moved from the old system to the new with little difficulty apart from having to redefine the raid array (without destroying the data).

My goal was to make a very quiet server as well so I replaced all the default, older noisy fans with some 18 – 28 db low noise fans (sound level varied with the size of the fans being replaced). I also got a super quiet CPU fan from Zalman.

I started the upgrade last evening about 7:30pm and finished at 3:00am. These things always take longer than you plan. The issue that took so long with this upgrade was that I was unsure I would be able to redefine the raid array without losing data so it took about 4 hours to back up the critical data before attempting to redefine the array which in the end only took about 5 minutes. Arrrg!! (Aye, that’s right, say it like a pirate thar matie) I guess I’m just overly cautious. I really should have started the back up remotely sometime in the afternoon as I’d figured I’d have to do it anyway.

In the end I’m fairly happy with the upgrade. The machine is very quiet and the CPU runs much cooler than the older pIII 800MHz CPU ran. My sensors used to display about 35 degrees C for the pIII and now the sensors report 22 degrees C for the p4 2.4GHz CPU. The Zalman coolers are great. I am unhappy with only one thing with this new motherboard and that is the support (or lack thereof) that the Linux lm_sensors have for the sensors on the MB. I only get one chip temp and two fan speeds but no voltages. Maybe a newer version of the sensor package will improve this support.

Overall, the upgrade has been great (9hrs. and counting…)