So in addition to my rampant addiction to using space, I now have an addiction to overkill hardware. I present my latest purchase, a 2u dual Opteron server:

My old fileserver had been showing signs of age for a while (the mobo+cpu was bought in early 2005 IIRC), so I started looking for a new solution. I spotted it on eBay for silly money, so after much deliberation, I bought it, along with a new boot HDD, pci SATA card, 1u pci-x riser and many caddies for my backup drives. Once I’d waited over a week for these things to arrive (well, everything was next day/with the server aside from the 1u riser, that took ages to come :|), I could begin configuring, installing and what have you.

Now one of the principal uses of old cookiemonster (for some reason I’ve always called my server cookiemonster, long story to that), was to stream media to my xbox and my brothers PS3. This was done using much hacking of Server 2003 so that it had uPnP installed and WMP11. This had been fairly easily done with 32 bit windows, as it was easy to hack the files out of XP. However, with new cookiemonster I kinda wanted to use  64bit OS. I pretty much ruled out Server 2008 from the beginning due to the cost, and the fact I’m NOT fucking with OS cracks for a main machine. So I “found” a copy of 64bit Windows 2003, and fired up VMWare and got to work. After about 50 incarnations of a 2003 VM, using various methods, files from both 64bit and 32bit XP, many WMP installs and even some shit from WHS. I could never get the damn thing to work. So to cut a long story short, I ended up using 32bit windows anyway, although in the process I did discover a very easy way to get Windows 2003 to play nice with uPnP. Using part of the hotfix files that WHS installs was the key as it installed everything very nicely.

So after nliting said file and some Silicon Image 3114 drivers into an ISO, I did one more final VMWare test, and it seemed I was all set. It did actually work, which I was amazed at, but what the hey.

Now I actually have the thing up and running, albeit with a loooot of installing and configuring still to do, but at least I can now access all my shit, and my xbox is happy.

For the boring/techy minded kiddies out there, here are obligatory pics.

Everything finally done

My nigger rig’d HDD cage for the boot HDD 😀

Backup drives in their new caddies. Mmm, 3250GB 😀

Shitty desk area where cookiemonster lives

The aftermath of taking old cookiemonster. My bedroom is still pretty much like this.

Also, I’ve now gained another useless desktop machine that was old cookiemonster, despite its hardware slowly dieing:

And as if the new server wasn’t enough, I’m already eyeing up my upgrade options, ECC DDR is pretty cheap nowadays, and I’ve found a pair of Opteron 275s for a good price (4 cores ftw :D).