I was taking a few pictures of the new server, and hit on the idea of trolling the photo library for a nerd photo essay on “phfactor: this is your life!”
Here’s circa 1998, Albuquerue: SparcStations dominate, with an LX for circuit design and running Office (DX2 486 PC on an Sbus card, quite cool for the time.) Fileserver and DNS on a sparc2 (using a DecStation box for the full-height hard drives!), sparcprinters and HPLJ3p, via Ghostscript. If you look closely, you’ll see a couple of SGI IRIX boxes, a 486 running FreeBSD 2.2.6 (dialup/NAT bridge), oscilloscopes, 10-base2/T hubs and other such arcana. The shelf with the monitors on the left is double-layer, as it sagged under the 100lb+ weight of the monster CRTs of the day. Man, I don’t miss those at all. Three seven-foot racks, custom made by my wonderful father-in-law-to-be:
Then there was my actual desk:
(Full album of pictures is here, FYI.)
Dual-Pentium-MMX, baby! One of my better projects underneath the monitor - car stereo amplifier/EQ, in a HP GBIB floppy enclosure I repurposed to house it and provide 12VDC. Still works! Clicky M-series keyboard and my ‘behind the 8-ball’ Kensington trackball. Looking close, I see my old 6-CD changer, whose primary use in life was running Riven without changing CDs for Chris. ;)
In Dec of 99, we moved to Dekalb, IL and I rebuilt the racks using smaller hardware, sold and gave away a few thousand pounds of obsolete stuff and restocked the racks for our shiny new DSL connection. Now running a Debian-based firewall on a Pentium 90:
The gap on the left is the just-sold Sparc 10. Good box, beautifully made and built. I also swapped my SGI Indigo2 for a Garmin Etrex GPS for flying. Good trade, that. Somewhere in here, phfactor started being a server and hosting a website. OpenBSD on Sparc is still one of my favorite platforms, super slim and damned near impossible to hack. I’m pretty sure the sparc LX there in the picture is serving up www.phfactor.net, very early on.
(That laserjet4M+ lasted close to a decade. Best printer from HP ever.)
The teeny-tiny monitor was surplus from the LANL/SNL auctions; former bank display. 7” monochrome VGA, and perfect for a server rack in the pre-LCD days.
In the lower right, there’s a 1920s-vintage voltage monitor that I scavenged from a physics trash can. Simple, easy to read, nice way to monitor your wall voltage. I still have it, actually. It shows up in a few pictures on this page.
After a 20-month lease, we bought a house in St Charles, with a big walkout basement, and I got to stacking:
[caption id=”attachment_1119” align=”aligncenter” width=”450” caption=”MaxStack ‘o’ Sparc”]
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That’s pure nerd beauty. SparcStations everywhere! Tape backup! DNS, web and mail, split across machines. Slow, loud, hot and hard to manage. Note the high-nerd-value Kalpana, the first ethernet switch if memory serves. Early-stage WiFi, too, D-Link hardware that worked pretty well.
Later, I collapsed to a server running Debian (lower left tower):
[caption id=”attachment_1118” align=”aligncenter” width=”450” caption=”Compute Corner”]
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Still have the laserjet4, though. And mixer. And Geiger counter. FibreChannel off to the left.
Across the room was the electronics bench:
Man, I miss having the space for the bench. It also worked great for building machines: (Here, I was shoehorning OSX 10.0/1 onto maxed-out PPCG3. Didn’t work very well.)
In 2005, we moved to Lincoln Ave in San Diego, and I gave away a lot more stuff. No more sparc, now trying for quiet gear. Debian moved to a Pentium-D box in an Antec Sonata II case with hardware RAID:
Now up to a color laserjet, heavier and not as good. On the plus side, no more heavy and power-hungry CRTs, either.
Now at last we get to the present. pHFactor is now completely run from a nearly-silent machine the size of a Harry Potter hardback:
[caption id=”attachment_1121” align=”aligncenter” width=”450” caption=”The old and the new”]
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(Zotac Ion mini-itx, Intel Atom 330 dual-core with 4GB of DDR3 and a 250GB laptop drive, external 90W PS. NV9400M, so 16-core nvidia GPU as a Cuda bonus. $189 for the motherboard, $65 for memory, $35 for the case. See below for links.)
That’s the Antec in the background for scale. The mini-itx hardware is freakin’ tiny:
Nice heatsink on the CPU, shows why it can run fanless:
I had initially planned on zero noise via no moving parts - the Zotac has an optional fan, and the case and PS have none. I had to compromise, though. SSDs are still too expensive (I need the 256GB) and in the end I had to use the Zotac chip fan due to the CPU hitting 89C. Thermal shutdown alerts, ahoy!
That’s with hard drive installed, pre cable cleanup.
And here’s the final shot, sitting very unobtrusively in the living room, dwarfed by the modem from AT&T U-verse:
If the room is quiet, you can hear the 40mm chip fan; other than that a huge win. The server now has fast ethernet to the modem, which solves all sorts of speed and reliability issues I was having with the previous WDS backbone to the upstairs. Yeesh, was that a lose.
Smaller, faster, cheaper, less noise, almost no heat, 4GB of memory and 4 CPUs when you log in. Damn but the times are amazing, and I’m a lucky nerd indeed. I am really coming to appreciate silence and low power, and now I’m basically down to finding a better mini-itx case that will have decent airflow. I think if I do that I can lose the chip fan.
The Atom is an amazing CPU, and these perform pretty well. See this and this and this for more info on it and the Zotac. It feels a bit slower when logged in, due to the slower laptop hard drive, but that’s a tradeoff I’m happy to make.
Update 9/24 - links to where I got hardware:
Xeot X1 Mini-ITX case, $40 or so.
Corsair XMS2, 4GB in two sticks, $65.
From your point of view, phfactor.net should be faster and more reliable. And hey, anyone need a pentium-d system, well-equipped?
Last but not least, check this out. It’s a large box, full of screws, for various computers. All from surplus, none purchased. I was looking at this and wondering how many machines I’d worked on to accumulate it. Dozens, maybe over a hundred? Wow.
Updated 9/26/09 - added bench pictures, hardware links, more edits and a bit of commentary.