win2000 server

[Force Flow]

Would I be able to run win2000 server on an old IBM PC Server 330 with dual PII 333MHz CPUs and 512MB RAM?

[Blakhart]

Yes, and it will make use of both cpus. That sounds like it will be a great server. The only question is if the mobo will be acpi compatible or not, some mobos of that era said they where acpi compliant, but left much to be desired. A check on bios updates may be in order. If the mobo is not acpi compliant in a real-world way, you will have to install 2k in the standard smp hal, rather than let it install the acpi smp hal.
At install when it says to hit f6 to add drivers, hit f5 instead and select the standard smp hal from the menu.
If you disable all the 2k services that are unneccessary or dangerous, you can get the cached mem total down to 64 megs in use. You will also need some kind of firewall if this box will be online, now more than ever.

[Force Flow]

Okay, so what does it mean for a server to be acpi compatible?

Here's the back story of where I am right now with it: There were origonally 2 nearly identical servers, so I thought I could cannabalize one to soup up the other. It has hot-swappable SCSI HDDs and a PCI SCSI expansion card. Other than that, I don't know a whole lot about it, or real servers in general.

[Blakhart]

Well, it's the mobo being compatible with acpi more than anything. The cpus must be acpi compatible too, but that's no longer an issue. Go ahead and install 2k in the acpi hal, using the above method to select the hal. If you get errors after/during the install, or at boot, or any at all regarding acpi, you will have to install the standard smp hal. You really want the acpi hal though, better benchmarks and a cooler running system, along with a small power saving. When I had run into a dual cpu bios that didn't support acpi, had to use the standard smp hal, the box ran hot since the cpus are running at full throttle the whole time, it had lockups and all sorts of probs. The heat issue could have been delt with, but acpi is so much nicer.
Ok now for the scsi subsystem: considering the age of the box, my guess is it's a scsi1 setup all the way through, 8bits wide, and max of 10 megs a second throughput on the drives, disregarding raid0 and all. It's still worthy of use though as the drives and subsystem take a load off the cpus that IDE can't touch. No sense in wasting them either. Leave them as they were found, as they have jumpers setting their ID number, their position on the cable or in the hot swap case is irrelevant. This means you will have to be carefull not to lose jumpers or move them. Keep in mind that the drive you boot from (meaning the drive the os is installed on) is usualy set as ID 0 by the HBA (Host Bus Adapter=scsi card), so the drive will have to be jumpered as ID 0. Again, the manuals will help... You can force the HBA to use another ID for boot, but I don't bother. When you start up the system, and you want to install the os, you might want to low level format the drives, wich is an option in the HBA (again, your scsi card).. To get into the HBA bios, use control-A at the right time during boot, this will cover Adaptec and certain other brands of HBA's. Watch the HBA bios screen to make sure. Root around in the adapter's options to see what's all in there, but don't change anything other than doing a low level on each drive. Low leveling will ensure a good drive(s) to install on. At the end of the cable there may be a plug in device, that would be the termination. They are needed to run properly so don't remove them. If the cable simply ends at the hot-swap box/cage/whatever, it is probably terminated inside.

Scsi is a topic all to itself, with the different speeds, bus widths, need for ID and termination, and what all that goes far beyond IDE. Get the model number of each part in the scsi system and do some googling for jumper settings and manuals and so on.

Complicated, but sure is fun to mess with.



Anything you have questions on regarding this stuff, let me know.
I deal with the older scsi stuff every day, and sometimes the newer stuff as well. I also have a few older drives and adapters around, if you would like to do some commerce.

[mairving]

I have actually had a machine, a Compaq Deskpro 400Mhz P2, that W2k would not install on because of ACPI. I was able to find a newer BIOS that fixed this. Funny thing is I had 4 of the machines with the same specs and only one had this problem.

I know one of your favorite things is looking for old BIOS's, Force. Hopefully you won't have to.

[Force Flow]

Originally posted by mairving I know one of your favorite things is looking for old BIOS's, Force. Hopefully you won't have to.

Hahahahaha! Yeah, I hope so too


Blackhard, wow, most of that went way over my head.

I have had absolutely no hands-on experience with servers or SCSI (since they cost so much ).

As for where I stand on the hardware installed, I've got 4 12GB hotswappable SCSI HDDs stripped and mirrored, I was told. In addition, I have 4 more 12GB hotswappable SCSI HDDs, one or two of which may be bad. I'll need to run diagostic tools on them for sure.

The drives in the server right now run and the previouly installed O/S boots flawlessly (netware 5.1)

The 2 PII 333MHz 512KB cache CPUs are both detected.

768MB of RAM is recognized.

I have a SCSI PCI card with a backup tape drive attached.

Now onto the questions:
1) Can you point me to a guide on SCSI? Something a beginner to it would understand? I need something like "servers 101"
2) Should I allow the drives to be stipped, or remove that feature. Is performace effected by stripping in this case?
3)I can tell you put some time in explaining to me how things work here, but could you explain what all these abbrevations are and what they mean? HBA, acpi, smp hal

[Blakhart]

At 12gigs, they may be scsiu2w, u2w is when real scsi happened..... The drives that you place your apps on should be on the mirrored and striped array. Mirrored for reliability, striped for performance. Basicaly striping stripes each drive with consequential data, track by track, and this gives the input/output speed and bandwidth of each drive a multiplication as a array. My guess is that this thing if striped will max out a pci bus, if not for the card. The card will probably only do 40/80megs a sec. Nice anyway. Mirrored is just that, each drive in the mirror array will be identical in every respect. Same data in the same sector of each drive. If one fails, the only thing that happens is a light comes on to tell you to swap the drive and rebuild the mirror. The os and the apps don't care and aren't affected by the drive outtage. Place the os on a mirrored array only, or a single drive, as striping the os is always a bad idea from a reliability standpoint. Look up the raid faq here at pcmech for more detail. In general, the HBA (scsi card) will do the striping and mirroring for you, unless it was set up as a software raid, as in the built-in raid ability in the os.
If you want a really indepth look into the acronyms, you should check out 2cpu.com. Doing a search there will leave you with all the info you want, if you don't mind going over some long threads. Unfortunately I know of no indepth server setup threads, but there is loads of stuff on stripe size and all the rest. As far as serving goes, what would you like to do with it? You could do a bbs like pcmech, an ftp, and all the rest. Decide what you'd like and then we can get a little more focused. For now just see what you can learn about scsi and raid, if you wanna. Glc and HAL will be great helps too. I suspect they have set up more "real" servers than I have.
All except for game servers, my forte...



The first thing I would do is get docs on all the parts, the model of drives, the scsi card, the mobo, everything, and do some reading.

[Force Flow]

Great, thanks Blackhard!

Yeah, I know about IDE RAID, but when it comes to the SCSI server...I'm a little stuck.

So... I'll be asking more questions once I learn a little more.

[Blakhart]

4sflowerRooR,
get my friking name right.

[Force Flow]

lol, sorry Blackhart. It was a typo.

[andyms18a]

Originally posted by force_flow2002 lol, sorry Blackhart. It was a typo.

and another