So I am suddenly getting into racks in a bigger way.
The reason is quite simple our Sun Fire V20Z has arrived. Tim Bray wrote about his two in My Own Computers saying:
I’d originally thought about shipping them to my office in Vancouver, then an insider told me “They’re nice computers but you do not wanna be in the room with ’em” and indeed, silence was evidently not a design goal.
As this V20Z is to run a number of SunRay 1G thin clients as home locating them elsewhere is not an option (at least before bandwidth becomes a lot cheaper). So I looked on Google for sound proof racks and found Kell Systems. I am most impressed, an out of hours email got a response at 19:16 the same day. When I phoned they were very helpful, they even got an engineer to go and check the thermal impact of a V20Z before recommending an appropriate rack. So I have a Houston model on order.
Then I noticed a few other things. On the IPCOP mailing list LinITX were recommended and they do have some neat small rack servers for firewalls with 3 network interfaces. Some of these come with IPCOP and others with m0n0wall a FreeBSD firewall with similar features.
So far the V20Z is very impressive (and yes noisy). It came with a single disk installed, but I had bought twin larger disks. These came in their cages and so installing them took about 30 seconds. Then upgrading to a DVD drive took a little longer as I had to remove 1 screw and 3 ribbon connectors.
On powerup I was able to configure RAID really easy without needing the operating system installed. Again really simple.
I have installed JDS 2.0 at least initially (I want to later experiment with Solaris 10 [when supported on opteron with SRSS support], and also Ubuntu). The install was simple, the ease of setting up LVM impressed. Less good was the age of JDS 2.0 which showed in mozilla 1.4, no firefox or thunderbird and only python 2.2.1. Still Firefox now works thanks to http://jdsapps.gcclinux.com/apps-r2.html
Next task is the DHCP server, then SRSS 3.0 so that I can get the first SunRay thin client on. I am trying a Samsung 19" screen initially (910T), initial impressions are very good, although when directly connected to the V20Z it does not seem to be able to manage 1280x1024 not sure why. Given there won't be any monitor on the V20Z in a short while this is not very significant.
The kids are starting to get interested in what they will be able to do with this beast, we are enjoying coming up with crazy ideas. So far they include a touch screen client in the Kitchen with a "Dinner is Ready" button which should case a fanfare to be played at every client in the house. Doubt if that will happen but hopefully we will have some fun "automating" our household in some completely useless ways. I hope that will introduce them to some new stuff that will include writing web apps in python.
[Update: Fixed typo]
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