DC Archived Thread of the Week (2001-05)

[osmo]

Hey Everyone

I coaxed Sherman & Mr. Peabody out of retirement and had them fire up the WayBack Machine. Their mission was to rumage through the endless 1's and 0's of Zuni's db server and dig up interesting threads from Team AnandTech's past.

This week's episode: The birth of The Core & The WebBox

This thread and future selections for AT o'the Week will be randomly chosen, no corrolation to the current point in time is intended, and the content is at the sole discretion of the time traveling experts. (Based on the fact that they are indeed cartoon characters, I'm sure that the mood of any threads chosen will be fun in nature so there is no need to be concerned that their travels will bring skeletons out of the closet )

I hope you enjoy the re-read as much as I did.

Osmo.

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• DNet RC5
• <--- this space reserved for DSI Gamma Flux
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[Assimilator1]

 

[Nohr]

Thanks for the link.
One question, what did the machine finally get upgraded to?

 

[osmo]

Nohr-

That is a good question! I went searching for a site info page over at teamanandtech.com but there doesn't appear to be one at the moment.

Can anyone involved with the project enlighten the others? Thanks!

Osmo.
My Stats

• DNet OGR
• DNet RC5
• <--- this space reserved for DSI Gamma Flux
• Seti@Home

 

[Viztech]

Good choice Osmo!

Lot's of interesting reading in that thread.

viz

 

[mechBgon]

OK, I'll take a stab at it. WebBox, aka The Edge, has:

• a pair of 256Mb PC100 DIMMs from Anand
  an Ultra160 SCSI RAID card, also from Anand
  dual P3 550MHz CPUs, Katmai version, on a Tyan Tiger100 rev. F motherboard
  an Ultra2SCSI 18Gb hard drive, converted from SCA via an adapter
  an IDE boot drive
  an Enlight 7237 with a custom ventilation setup by jatwell. I can't find the link to the pictures of it anymore, can anyone help me there?
  an insane amount of airflow, due to a 130cfm YSTech 120mm fan, dual high-output 60mm YSTech fans, a pair of 80mm fans, and of course the power supply's 80mm fan. If this thing were on wheels...
  a 10/100 Ethernet card linking it at 100Mb/sec to The Core via a crossover cable, and another network card linking it to the network at Mika's workplace
  Windows 2000 Server, donated by DCypher.net

As for The Core:

• a pair of 128Mb PC100 DIMMs and a 64Mb PC100 DIMM
  an Ultra2SCSI card
  dual Celeron 300@450MHz CPUs on an Abit BP6 motherboard (?)
  an Ultra2SCSI 18Gb hard drive, converted from SCA via an adapter
  an IDE boot drive
  case... not sure
  a 10/100 Ethernet card linking it at 100Mb/sec to The Edge via a crossover cable.
  Windows NT Workstation 4.0, I believe

I think I am close at least, maybe Mika can correct that if I made any mistakes.

Anand not only helped us with his contribution of 512Mb of high-quality RAM and an Ultra160 card, but also his time and expertise, asking for the details of the two machines' intended duties in order to help us identify the bottlenecks.

edit: dang, the &quot;bullet&quot; feature has goofed on me... editing...
edit#2: ok, that went from bad to worse... removing all bullets... editing...

edit #3: see ViRGE's and Mika's posts for the correct hardware list, I made a couple errors.

 

[ViRGE]

Close, but no cigar mech. The entire fleet uses Tyan Tiger 100s, including the Core. Also, the Edge is running a pair of 9GB HDs, runing in stripping mode.

 

[mechBgon]

doh! :Q

 

[Nohr]

Wow, nice setup and an even more impressive job raising the money to get it.
I'd love to see the pics of the modded Enlight case. I've got one and would like to see what can be done with it.

 

[mechBgon]

Wooomooooo!!! FOUND THE PICS: jatwell's thread

edit: the hard drives ended up being parked right behind the 120mm fan. How's that for a HDD cooler?!

 

[Nohr]

Oh wow! Awesome stickers!! Too bad they're one of a kind.
Nice fan mods too. Could add a blowhole, and cut out the case's fan grills and put in some chrome ones to help airflow and lower noise slightly. Just something that came to mind as I was perusing the pics.

 

[Mika]

Very close mech! You have a great memory!

I am planning on building a page at some point in time which details the machines, and the generous folks who donated money and hardware. It was really an incredible outpouring of support, an although it took much longer to get into production than planned, it has been running nearly flawlessly since then.

More than 40 people from around the world donated time and hardware to bring this project to light.

Here are some pictures of both machines: http://www.teamanandtech.com/images/server/

edge (the webserver / db)
Since 10/21/2000:
System Availability: 99.9139%
Total Uptime: 104d 8h:6m:26s
Total Downtime: 0d 2h:9m:29s
Total Reboots: 13
Mean Time Between Reboots: 8.03 days
Total Bluescreens: 0

• dual P3 550 Katmai CPU's (one donated by Russ)
• tyan Tiger 100 rev F (originally donated by jatwell but the original was damaged in shipping)
• 2 x 256MB Corsair Dimms donated by Anand
• dual channel, 64bit Ultra 160 SCSI controller (not hardware RAID) unfortunately only on a 32bit PCI slot donated by Anand
• 2 x 9GB Seagate Cheetah's 10,000 RPM donated by Drakkhen One drive houses the OS and website, and the database sits on the other drive. Each drive is on a seperate channel of the SCSI controller.
• Enlight 7237 donated and modified by jatwell IIRC, mechBgon donated many of the fans for the modification
• there is only a single network card in each of the machines. At this time, I don't remember who donated the NIC, but I have all that info at home. The NIC is connected to a 100MBit switched hub, so all the traffic between edge and core does not take bandwidth away from anything else. The connection to the Internet is a 10MBit fibre connection.

core the pproxy
Since 1/2/2000:
System Availability: 99.5732%
Total Uptime: 395d 2h:32m:11s
Total Downtime: 1d 16h:38m:37s
Total Reboots: 29
Mean Time Between Reboots: 13.68 days
Total Bluescreens: 0
Notes:
1/2/2000 is the earliest date in the event log where
sufficient information is recorded to calculate availability.

• dual celeron 300a oc to 450
• tyan tiger100
• 2 x 128MB DIMMS (the second was purchased with donations from an earlier set of donations) and 1 64MB DIMM donated by mechBgon IIRC
• 9GB Quantum Fireball KA
• 100MBit NIC donated by Netopia
• In Win A500 (?) with a little mod

Please forgive me if I have messed up with any of the people who donated (email me if you can correct me). I don't have the information with me, and am going from memory as best as possible. Also, there was a tremendous amount of cash donations (around US$1000) which was used to purchase a great deal of the gear (and to pay for import customs and duty - grrrr).

It was truly an impressive show of team spirit, and I feel honoured to have been involved in it at all.

I will make an effort to put up a page with more details and more pictures.

Mika