Today I ordered the new box, that, as I said, is called Yamato. I’ll get on the reason for this particular name in a little 🙂
I got the money available with a short term loan; thanks to everybody who has (and might) chip in, in order (up to now) Raimund, Anton, Federico, William, Jürgen, Jim and Marcel, if I didn’t have at least some availability it wouldn’t have been possible for me to place the order.
So, what are the specs of the famous “expensive” computer? (at least for US standards) Two Opteron 2350 (Barcelona), Tyan Thunder n3600B motherboard, 16 GB of registered RAM, cheap-o-graphics X1550 video card (there is an embedded XGI but afaict it does not support dual DVI which is a requirement for me — the only one basically), a chassis, the cheapest black DVD burner, and a decent Active PFC PSU.
My original plan included a 3Ware hardware RAID card and 3x500GB Seagate HDs, which costed around €700 by themselves. But then, I can consider that in the future. As for why not using software RAID, well, I’ve been told to not rely on that at all. Actually, the motherboard I have should support “firwmare-based” RAID5, but even that. Who knows, at any rate I can consider the rest in the future, when I got a job to pay for that, rather than having to ask.
New disks or not, the idea for Yamato was for me to use the system installed in Enterprise as a basis, and going on with that, that’s why the name. The USS Yamato was, in Star Trek TNG, the twin sister starship of the flagship USS Enterprise, Galaxy class. The new box would have had a system cloned from Enterprise; in this case it will have the same system as I’ll be using the same disks.
The only thing will have to reconfigure the kernel from scratch as the only thing to remain the same will be the architecture (but the one I have now is just an UP kernel), the network card that is still Marvell, and the two cards that I’ll be importing from Enterprise (WiFi and Sound), and of course changing all the references to “enterprise”.
I hope my wire transfer will be received by Friday (SEPA transfer), so that the order can be shipped on Monday. I didn’t get the express shipment, as it would have costed €100 more alone, and I’m relying on standard UPS taking from three to four days usually. If I’m lucky, by the 22nd I’ll have the package here, and in the night Yamato should be up. It would be perfect because I’ll probably be in the hospital starting the 25th, and if Yamato is already up and running, I can coordinate its work from there too.
But my development work is not entirely stopped, so more posts will follow about topics I hinted at in the past weeks.