V
Videodrome
Guest
I'm still doing this internship thing at a PC Shop and the owner let me pick over the pile of old hardware. I lugged home this big old tall Tower that I think was possibly a small business server from the early 2000s.
"dmesg | grep intel" says I have a 440gx Motherboard
"cat /proc/cpuinfo" says I have two 500 Mhz CPUs
After going through some old RAM chips I'm now running 1 GB which is probably the max for this motherboard.
Anyway, I'm using this big tower to learn hardware better and explore ways that Linux can be setup. So far, I have one DVD drive and 3 Hard Drives installed after reading up on the Master / Slave jumpers.
I decided to try installing Debian Wheezy and did my Partitions manually across 3 drives. I gave / it's own 14 GB drive and /home it's own 13 GB drive. I split the 3rd drive giving most of it to /var and some for swap space.
To confirm this setup, I tried rebooting with my /home drive unplugged. GRUB still tried to boot, but threw an error with the option to continue. At the main screen, my main user name login failed, but I could login as Root. Next, I tried booting with my drive containing /var and my SwapSpace unplugged Debian failed to boot. With all 3 hard drives plugged in, Debian boots fine.
So the point of this exercise is to see if Linux can live on multiple-storage devices and maybe gain performance while doing so. This way one Hard Drive doesn't need to do everything. I'm curious if anyone else has dabbled in this or if there are even better ways to optimize this kind of setup.
For now, the end result isn't to shabby and I even slapped in an old ATI Video card. I'm wondering if I could roll with some good retro-gaming on this thing.
"dmesg | grep intel" says I have a 440gx Motherboard
"cat /proc/cpuinfo" says I have two 500 Mhz CPUs
After going through some old RAM chips I'm now running 1 GB which is probably the max for this motherboard.
Anyway, I'm using this big tower to learn hardware better and explore ways that Linux can be setup. So far, I have one DVD drive and 3 Hard Drives installed after reading up on the Master / Slave jumpers.
I decided to try installing Debian Wheezy and did my Partitions manually across 3 drives. I gave / it's own 14 GB drive and /home it's own 13 GB drive. I split the 3rd drive giving most of it to /var and some for swap space.
To confirm this setup, I tried rebooting with my /home drive unplugged. GRUB still tried to boot, but threw an error with the option to continue. At the main screen, my main user name login failed, but I could login as Root. Next, I tried booting with my drive containing /var and my SwapSpace unplugged Debian failed to boot. With all 3 hard drives plugged in, Debian boots fine.
So the point of this exercise is to see if Linux can live on multiple-storage devices and maybe gain performance while doing so. This way one Hard Drive doesn't need to do everything. I'm curious if anyone else has dabbled in this or if there are even better ways to optimize this kind of setup.
For now, the end result isn't to shabby and I even slapped in an old ATI Video card. I'm wondering if I could roll with some good retro-gaming on this thing.