3 x mobos suggestions needed

[untitled]

okies -

i have 3 boxen atm, i will probably be adding eithe 2 or 4 more soon.

i want to save some physical space and group them all together, so i'm obviously thingking about racks.

but, i'd like to get my head around clustering/ diskless booting, so i'm giong to want to want to stick all the opticals, and HDDs ttogether.

i've seen a few home made solutions but they look a little scrappy.

basically, ideas and suggestions appreciated.

(box specs in sig)

 

[draconius]

if you want to go rackmount....
buy 4 4u rackmount cases for 80$ a pop
get one more 4u case that has lots of drive bays
mount all your hdd's in said case

install freebsd on said machine, and configure it as a bootp/dhcp server, and configure it as an nfs server....setup other machines to boot off of network....ta da you have a diskless setup, wihch could be clustered or so on

 

[rm.o]

And also lend your boxes to the [H]orde

 

[ameoba]

I'm not so sure about diskless, headless windows. It's cake to do with Linux (or BSD). http://ltsp.org/ is one site that talks about it; but there's plenty of other resources. Of course, if you were really concerned about this angle, you'd be posting in the OS forum.

When you say you want to put them in a rack , are you talking about just setting up a rack (like a heavy duty wire rack) and placing the machines in it or are you considering actually getting some 2U/4U cases (You're going to need at least 3U to hold those Dell PSUs since you can't use standard ATX power with Dell board) and transfering all your hardware over to a 19" rack?

'Real' rackmount hardware is noisy as hell. I don't think I'd want any of it next to my desk. Moving all the machines onto a heavy wire rack in the garage, placing LInux (with Mosix?) on them and accessing them through X would probably be the simplest & fastest way to go; unless you really need extra boxes for windows.

 

[untitled]

cool - fast & informative detailed responses. thank you.

to be honest this is at an early stage - whilst i've been thinking about it for a while, i'm now at a stage where implementation can begin (once a s suitable path is chosen).

i've been looking @ BSD and afaik they have just completed an SMP release, so thats a viable option.

as for linux, i have a couple of cluster_knoppix (ala open mosix built in) 'live' releases but haven't been able to get them talking/ working as one yet. so again a viable option, but needs some more finesse on my part.

i have no real objections to noise atm, when all 3 machines and monitors (see post a pic of your dualie thread - my desk/ setup is in there) they make a fair whack of noise anyhoo - tbh, a nice new(ish) cleaner rack setup might be quieter.

i could feasibly build a heavy-duty-wire setup, but i'd rather get second hand units and mod them to my needs.

my current set up is that the two dell boxes are running (quite) happily under server 2K3 ent ed. again, i should say that i'm not master at this level, and as such i havent had to set up damins, dns servers and the like, but i'm very mich looking forward to getting my hands dirty.

cheers for the linky amoeba - will spend some time there later on this evening.

as regards folding for the [H]orde, 2CPU got first dibs , but, i'm positive i'll divide my spare cycles equally between here and there.