Before anything else, I need to give a special thanks to Wholesale Internet. They have really been a great company to be with and have really worked with myself and my old group. I have been with Wholesale Internet since mid-2004. Little hardware has changed since then and the thing has never hiccuped. To say the least, it is not your average server.
When the idea of creating a server was first coming together, we decided to go with donations from the [H]ard|Military members. Our first setup was a Celeron 1.1Ghz on a microATX motherboard with 256MB of ram. Another member found a 1u chassis online (locally for him) for 20 bucks. What a deal! When it was all assembled and done, it was mediocre at best. We had found a colocation company in California that gave us 300GB per month for 50 bucks. Hard to pass that up. The poor Celly could barely sustain the 20 players required by the tournaments we played. We hobbled along until a few members got fed up and decided it needed an upgrade. An 1800+ Tbred A processor was donated and an excellent MSI K7N420 pro nForce1 motherboard was purchased and an extra stick of memory was added. Wow what a difference! A few months later, and without warning I might add, the whole datacenter was purchased and supposedly moved overnight to Tampa Bay, Florida. The new datacenter, Sago Networks, absolutely sucked. We were down for a week and once brought online, pings were 200+ for nearly everyone. While down there, one of the members worked at a body shop and offered to give the machine a paint job (pictures at the bottom). Nice job JohnnyManson! It didn't take long for us to get sick of their problems and inefficiency. We had offeres to several places and ended up with Wholesale Internet based out of Kansas City, MO...I just so happened to live 4hrs away at the time...and 30 minutes now. During this move, we upgraded again. We now had a power house, specs are below. By the time BF2 rolled around, membership was waning and we all had begun to find other interests. We lasted from Aug, 2003 clear through 2005.
A few of us at this point decided to join up at 21st Century Warfare and brought the server with us. Here, it was stressed to its limits. The machine was actually filled with 64 players and uploading a sustained 3Mbit/s. For a home brew server, that is saying a lot.
Finally, in late 2005, due to work taking the only time to practice, I hung up gaming. I have turned towards building up a web server that offers many services. Currently, the server hosts the following servers: Apache HTTP, PHP, MySQL, Ventrilo, MailSurge, and FTP. With every application, I learn how it can interact with other services.
- The guts:
- Windows XP Pro
- AMD Mobile AthlonXP 2400+
This processor normally runs at 1.8GHz, but was overclocked to 2.166GHz. While not usually advisable...this server came from members of [H]ard|OCP! Temps are in the low 40's Celcius. - LeadTek NF2 motherboard w/ onboard GF4MX
Since we had the idea to use a mobile processor in a desktop/server environment, the NF2 with its native support for mobiles was an obvious choice. We took a chance and got a refurb for 50 bucks. It worked. - 2 x 512MB Samsung PC2700 DDR memory
Finally, the pictures of the beautiful paint job. Roll that beautiful bean footage!
