Screws In My Coffee

I rode my bike into Austin on my inaugural Cedar Park to Austin bike commute.  It was so cold that when I got 3 miles from my house I had to turn around and go back and get my winter gloves.  This morning it was 48 degrees but when I got to 20 MPH my fingers started to hurt.  I had no other problems except that I have the usual sore butt from not riding in 8 months.  That will resolve itself by riding more.

After running 100k (62 miles) on a trail at Bandera Texas I have found a void in my trail running training .  so this weekend I dusted off my bike and on Saturday I rode 10 miles. Today I drove my truck down to the 24 Hour Fitness near UT and rode my bike 23.5 miles back to Cedar Park.  Tomorrow I’ll do my first bike commute in 2009.

While I was riding back home facing mild head winds I thought about my training goal for 2008 and how I ran 1,100 miles instead of 1,000 miles.  I decided that this year I would plan on running 1,000 miles and riding my bike 2,000 miles.  I have never kept track of my yearly mileage since I moved to Texas.  When I lived in Portland, Oregon I rode 3,000 to 4,000 miles for several years.  Bike commuting is the key for me to do that sort of miles in one year.

So I plan on riding my bike a few times a week and running on the weekends and see how I fell. I am glad that I have reduced my weight by 20 pounds and lost several inches off my waist and theigs.  I really noticed my trim legs when I rode my bike because there was more clearance between my theighs and my saddle than the last time that I rode it 8 months ago.

I am planning my next server.  I want to build a server that is optimized for running virtualized computers and large disk storage. I’m using this post to take some notes. With all of this information in one place my goal is for it to help me design my next computer. There is a lot of information about computer parts on the Internet and this is the source of this information.

Some of my friends have asked why I build my own computers and I always reply because it is fun and I learn a lot. I rarely document my design process so here is a place to watch how I do it.

Intel® Xeon® Processor 7000 Sequence

These processors are for servers

I will go with the cheapest 45nm quad core with 12mb L3 cache, the Xeon E7430.  Now I’ll search for a motherboard.

Intel® Xeon® Processor 5000 Sequence

These processors are for workstations.

Processor Number?	Cache	Clock Speed	Front Side Bus	System Type	Power	Dual-core	Quad-core
45-nm technology
X5492	12MB	3.40 GHz	1600 MHz	DP	150W
X5470	12MB	3.33 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	120W
X5482	12MB	3.20 GHz	1600 MHz	DP	120W
X5472	12MB	3.00 GHz	1600 MHz	DP	120W
E5472	12MB	3.00 GHz	1600 MHz	DP	80W
E5462	12MB	2.80 GHz	1600 MHz	DP	80W
X5460	12MB	3.16 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	120W
X5450	12MB	3.00 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	120W
E5450	12MB	3.00 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	80W
E5440	12MB	2.83 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	80W
L5430	12MB	2.66 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	50W
E5430	12MB	2.66 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	80W
L5420	12MB	2.50 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	50W
E5420	12MB	2.50 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	80W
L5410	12MB	2.33 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	50W
E5410	12MB	2.33 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	80W
E5405	12MB	2.00 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	80W
X5272	6MB	3.40 GHz	1600 MHz	DP	80W
X5270	6MB	3.50 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	80W
X5260	6MB	3.33 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	80W
L5240	6MB	3.00 GHz	1333 MHz	DP	40W
E5205	6MB	1.86 GHz	1066 MHz	DP	65W

For a 3D expert system Intel recommends this Xeon X5482 configuration.

The motherboard is a dual processor with LGA771 socket design.

ASUS DSEB-DG/SAS

High Power Efficiency Platform with SAS Support Ready

ASUS new server board DSEB-DG/SAS is based on 45nm Intel® Xeon® 5400/5300/5200/5100 processor with the green design of 90%+ power efficiency. Featured with leading-edge technology including FSB 1600MHz, FB-DIMM 800MHz, PCI-Express Gen2 x16 and SAS support, the DSEB-DG/SAS is the most out-performance server board which is ideal for enterprise-class and computing demanding applications.

Asus DSEB-DG/SAS mother board

Motherboard Specifications

Here is a specification for a Dell server.

The last two weeks have been spent inside mostly. I have not run during this time. My personal time on weekends has been divided between doing volunteer support for the Rocky Racoon race in Huntsville and fixing my computer. I have not been drawing on Friday either so this month has been quite a change from my routine.

I have regained some of the lost abilities by re-building my home server with CentOS. I really like using Linux and I hope that I can keep it as my host operating system. My experiment with using virtual PCs is proving to be very time consuming to set up. I will spend one more day working on completing the project. My beta test with a small Vista virtual PC was successful. My goal was to see if I could build a Vista box and then have access to it using remote desktop from Sylvia’s computer. I completed this test last night. Now I will build a production virtual PC tomorrow and she will use it to work on her landscape projects.

This weekend I will get out and run.  I also plan to ride my bike at least one mile.

After a long absence from the Linux community I am disappointed about the lack of support for easy RAID5 in Ubuntu (Debian). I spent about 3 days trying to get RAID 5 to work under Ubuntu with my onboard Fake Raid controller from Intel.  What I learned is that my next purchase will be a real hardware based RAID controller from 3Ware.  I have avoided these add on controlers because of the cost, and now I realize that they are worth it.  I added RAID card into a client’s computer about a month ago and installed Windows XP on it without any problems.  The 3Ware cards are supported in all OSs including Linux and Vista.

I am installing CentOs 5 (RedHat clone) using software RAID.  This is what I had on the computer yease ago.  I say this is the same computer, but in reality the only thing that is original is the Antec Tower case and fans.  I had to compromise and put the boot partition on a single drive because I did not hade a drive to do a RAID1 configuration.  I will regret thsi in about a year.

My plan for this computer is to install VMware server and then install virtual machines using the operating systems that I like.  If I have to rebuild the host computer I cna off-load the virtual machine images and then re-install them after rebuilding the computer.

So this evening at 7:45 PM I have a Cent0s 5.2 system. I have never run any virtualzation software so I am trying gemu which comes with CentOS.  I am installing Vista and I hope that my computer with 4 GB of memory will be enough to work.