Adventures from State Surplus - Dell PowerEdge 6400/700 Part 1

Last summer I dropped down to State Surplus to look for some good deals on "gently used" PC hardware. Apparently the state of ND decided to upgrade an entire data center and replace all their Dell PowerEdge servers that had gotten a bit old. There were racks and racks of svelte looking black hardware.

These servers all looked really nice, some had dual power supplies, some had tons of drive bays. I started eyeballing the minimal labeling on the chassis tops of the servers and came across some PowerEdge 6400s that looked pretty good. One of them had a nice big sticker on it that said METAFRAME, which I thought was pretty techie sounding and it endeared it to me right away. Kinda like that look puppies give you at the pet store. I don't think any other servers came with a Name, by Goo Goo Dolls.

I took it over the their test table, and let me tell you it was a bit of a workout. This thing weighs in at 110lbs spec and it had two SCSI drives and the full load of processors and RAM installed. I bet it wasn't more than 150lbs but it felt like 200!

I got it onto the table and had to head back to their cable section for another power cord. This thing has three power supplies and can run on any two of them. It also has a sweet 8 bay RAID setup on the front that looked promising.

I powered the thing up and it sounded much less like the Dell jet engines I've installed in enclosed racks for some of my customers. Those things would about blow me out of my chair during installation. I guess that's why people use enclosed racks tho. The 6400 ran at about 1/10th that noise.

Boots up fine, counts out 2GB of RAM and Four PIII Xeon 700 procs. "This will make a nice vmware server, matey!" I thought to myself. Sometimes I like to talk like a pirate, and sometimes I talk like a pirate to myself too... I know I'm crazy but September 19th is my favorite day of the year.

The tag on the 6400 says $180 and I only have about $200 on me. These guys don't take credit cards and I don't really want to run back to an ATM and then come back here so I just leave the server on the bench.

So I'm talking to the manager, not like a pirate. I know I'm nuts and I'm thinking of a little haggle. Normal people never want to give crazies a good deal. I've also got a KVM that does USB and audio that I recognized because I had bought an identical model at Staples a few weeks back. I paid $80 for it and was going to return it, since the one here was only $10. I can't seem to get out of here without a $25 22" CRT so I had one of those on the bench too.

The guy starts to check me out when the power goes out.

That's right, power failure right there in the surplus center. Luckily I got the manager right there in front of me checking me out and he starts using a solar calculator, which dies in about ten key presses without overhead lights, and then switches to carbon and cellulose.

We laughed a bit about how the paper and pencils still work w/o power when I asked him what kind of a deal he can give me on the PowerEdge server. He shot right back "Make an offer." I looked into my wallet then and fingered the $20's, remember that I'm hungry and lunch needs to be paid for, and said "$180 for this stuff and the server."

"Done."

So I rolled the monitor into the backseat and muscled the monster server machine into the front seat of my 3000GT as a passenger for the trip back to my torture center, er home network...

more to come in part II.

Porter's got a hard case!

I'm sure you all remember how porter got all linuxified a while back. I forgot to mention that the little warrior also has some hard core, well at least heavy cardboard, armor to keep him and his gear safe from getting punted across the coffee shop by my big clumsy feet.

I can't stand soft cases for laptops. Sure they last a long time and you can jam them fuller than a soccer mom's purse, but the I'd rather have a broken case and a working laptop than a case that's fine and a broken screen on my laptop. Hard cases also tend to be lighter so they're not a Burden in My Hand, by Soundgarden.

This thing is perfect! It fits the Solo 200STM with no goofy straps to adjust the case size at all, leaving just enough room for a finger on both front corners. Now this case might look just a bit familiar to some of you happy Wal-Mart shoppers. That's because this is NOT a laptop case. What I did was take porter to local retail chains and compare his size to the DVD/CD and other case systems they had. I started out with this one from Best Buy which is a case for the Nintendo DS and a bunch of accessories.

I was quite disappointed with this full aluminum case ended up being 1/32" to small to fit porter. It turned out for the best tho, because the DS kit only had about 1/2" of headroom. The Vaultz one I found at Wal-Mart that fits with about 1/32" EXTRA on each side, is quite a bit thicker leaving about 2 & 1/2" headroom and a net pouch in the lid.

Here's what you'd need to do to convert the Vaultz into a perfect Gateway Solo case.

1. Remove the sleeves from the ring binder.
2. Take a drill or sharp (soon to be duller, I'm such a hick) screwdriver and drill out the rivets.
3. Remove the entire metal assembly that holds the rings for the binder in place.
4. Use about 8" of Velcro strapping as a hinge lock. Use the hard plastic part. (The hinge lock hard to see in my photo there, it's on the right hand side and slips beside the case and under the laptop and under the PC Cards on the top. I got it almost in 2D mode look for the little black line.)
5. Take whatever other Velcro stuff you can find to make pouches or separate the webbing on the "top" part of the case.

I ended up with this. Notice that the power cable and an extra CAT5e fit just fine in the netting once I split it into two sections with a Velcro thing I pulled out of my Glock 23 kit, and I have room for my Schrade Multi-tool and a packet of PC Cards. One's a USB2.0 Adapter, there's a SD MMC card, a super compatible PrismII based card and another 10/100 NIC. I use alot of this stuff in other machines on the job.

There's also enough room under the base of the machine for a couple of the pages from the DVD/CD binder so I can have 16 or so DVD's in the case for LiveCD's or utilities on the job.

I've taken this case out on many jobs and to local businesses. I either work or write a bit out in public and this case gets just as many comments as the tiny laptop does. People wonder why I need to have my music with me, or "What's in the Magic Box?" I just pop it open and show them that I got my whole computer in there. They just can't believe it, to them a laptop "bag" should be about three times as big.

Not only is it super stylin' it was also cheap. Compare with these other cases that don't have the perfect fit and cost $50+. I think that I got the winner right here.

Never be afraid to take a few minutes and find new uses for the cheaper stuff that store sell. Other laptops would fit into other cases and portable systems for toting your Wii or PS3 around. Bring your laptop down to the store and see what it fits in, get a case that is unique and suprise people when you pull your road warrior out rather than a CD or PSP.

Adventures from State Surplus - Compaq IPaq C500

On yet another trip to ye olde State Surplus Property of ND I found a rack full of these IPaqPC's. Little PIII C500 500's w 256MB of RAM. These should make very nice media center machines.

But as usual there's a reason they're only $25. They don't have any removable media in them whatsoever, and won't boot from USB. I have a bunch of laptop DVD drives in a box on my back porch, but NOO! The CD bay they sport is a Compaq mainstay. Proprietary all the way. No one else on the planet would use a laptop removable drive bay slide-in system on a desktop PC based on a Firewire port replicator for the Armada line. But this is what they did.

Don't get me wrong, for $25 I guess this is about what you're gonna get. I just can't imagine anyone paying the $1100 these things must have cost back in 2002.

So I started trying to figure out how to take this sucker apart. Nope, can't do it without some special Compaq lug spacer plastic popper dohickey. I got the Compaq center pin torx kit for all the other crap they sell, but this thing is a beast! Oh well, plastic is as plastic does. "SNAP!" Wow, look at the guts.

Insert random DIMM here, look for cables there...

Luckily a standard IDE interface chip is cheaper than a locked out single so after slapping a two port IDE cable into this thing I can hang a standard DVD drive out the side to do a software load.

Windows XP Pro. It took it ok, I had another 256MB PC133 DIMM that I stuck into the other slot and XP does just fine with that much RAM.

$30 for a 21" CRT and $4 worth of keyboards and mice later I'm watching a DVD over the network in vlc. Smoothness.

After about a week of running in the basement for my basement dweller dude as a media center he FINALLY got around to installing three root kits and fifteen spyware programs. I told him pr0n would burn out the monitor, but he has no faith in me! Firefox with noscript wasn't even enough to save him!
I decided that I wasn't going to re-install this thing every week so basement dude can wack it to whatever so I roll out my buddy Fedora Core 6. I had installed this on my laptop porter a few weeks back and it liked that machine. There's no reason it won't work on this odd shaped box.

Running the install was fast and easy, every little thing that the machine comes with came right up in Linux. Unfortunately he also like to show off his I'm too sexy! by Right Said Fred on his webcam.

Of course, it's the only one that FC6 doesn't support out of the box. It's a SPCA50X based device, so I have to download an after market rpm that has it for the same minor number of the kernel. Copy to the correct location, depmod -a and a modprobe spca50x...

Viola! Look at that guy's nose hairs!

Now it's a amarok sporting, divx playing, kopete chatting, speed demon.

Well speed demon compared to how slow it was in XP Pro. Even with the eye candy on it's much more responsive, and the aforementioned fusesmb let's me just drop the whole network into a file system so he just has to remember what the share names are.

Porter, as in that guy who carries stuff.

I set up my sweet itty bity baby lappy with Fedora Core 6 the other day. I mostly use porter as a remote video station for my bedroom when I want to do uTube or watch something with qpel that my mpg4 portable hard drive can't play.

I was stuck with Windows XP Pro on it for a long time, it's just a little Pentium M 1GHz machine 512MB RAM, about an inch thick when the floppy/cd base is off and a 12.1" screen on it. It's just powerful enough for HD content via divx. XP Pro works with my network, doing the WPA2 wireless (I just happened to have a pair of Intel 2200BG 802.11G minipci cards, don't ask, long story) and network neighborhood stuff for my three file servers that I have most of my media on.

I found Beryl a while back, which is a neato alpha channeled window manager with a rocking 3D desktop on a cube. I tested it out with Sabayon LiveCD, and it liked the Intel graphics chip on my lappy! I was so jazzed that I broke the drive in half and installed it.

Too bad that Sabayon is so terrible as a daily use system! You can't update ANYTHING and their package manager is hopelessly broken. I poked around a bit and found that Redhat's antecedent Fedora Core has beryl too, so I slapped that into porter's little brain.

KDE is great, but some of the FC6 components are bit iffy, so I installed KNetwork Manager, rather than the default networking system, and also got KBFX since the menu system for kde is a clunky out dated POS. I would love to have kickoff like sabayon uses, but that's a KDE 4 thing and FC6 is still on KDE 3.5.

The thing that closed the deal for me was fusesmb. This software lets me mount my whole CIFS network neighborhood onto a mount point. Now I can get to all my audiobooks and TV shows without the BS of KDE thinking it has to download the whole damn file into a cache before it plays it with kaffeine.

Used it for week and I realized that I hadn't had any reason to go back to XP on porter. So XP had to go. Linux made that easy too, the LVM system that comes with FC6 made it easy to add a new partition that was the space XP was on into the mix and resize the filesystem with just a boot to a LiveCD and a couple of commands.

If I had somewhere to put the 200GB of content on my main system while I go linux on it I think my home PC could do it too, but my three 21" CRT's and 1 touchscreen have yet to play nice on a LiveCD, and once you've hit that Plateau by Nirvana and had that much workspace you really can't go back.

Adventures from State Surplus - ThinStar NCD300

On a recent adventure to one of my favorite places, North Dakota State Surplus Property, I decided to break down and drop $15 on a NCD 300. These guys have stacks of these little monsters for super cheap.


I was hoping that the audio jacks on the back meant that I could possibly use this bad boy as at least a music terminal without too much trouble.

I was right about the music terminal, but not about the trouble. Flaming reverse backflips through hoops ensued!

I found online that these things run Windows CE 2.1 which is a bummer. NCD has crippled this poor little P133 so completely you can't even find a way to smash one of Linus' awesomely flexible kernels into it. Technically the S3 Trio video adapter "should" be able to handle full screen video.

I popped over to HPC Factor to see if I could find some other software. (HPC Factor has some awesome Windows CE resources. Check them out if you need to find drivers for your old CE based PDA.) I found nothing. Looks like I'm stuck with CE 2.1 bleah! This is the most abandoned OS in the history of the world. No one made any software for it because it was so crappy.

The thin clients that this machine comes with were for RDP and ICA. I put in the ip address and connected to my handy dandy fileserver that I have on the stairwell to my attic behind a door I don't have a key for (another long story) and it came up in 16 color mode! Progress! Now how to get this thing to play music?

I got no sound. NCD knows there's no sound. of course they don't care.

"NCD has no plans to offer any software updates to enhance the TS450/400/300 product.

NCD is now selling software that converts any existing or new PC into a manageable Thin Client device. NCD ThinPATH PC provides users with a simple to used UI like today's Window Based Terminals or a Windows like UI. It also provides administrators with a PC lock down tool and a simple to use desktop management tool. NCD ThinPATH PC allows administrators to choose if/which PC applications are run locally or from the Terminal Server host. Test drive NCD ThinPATH PC at http://www.ncd.com or download NCD ThinPATH PC and Portal from http://www.ncd.com/downloads to fully test all the features. This product includes a free no restriction 2 user licenses. It is provided upon download of NCD ThinPATH Portal/PC software."

However, they do want me to purchase a full fledged PC and BUY their shitty PC based thin client software to connect to my Windows 2k3 server. I thought the whole point to thin clients is that they would work in the future with anything?! I guess back in 1999 the future was 2002, not 2003.

So at this point I got two choices, install a Windows 2000 Terminal Server JUST FOR THIS THIN CLIENT, or get a copy of Citrix Metaframe JUST FOR THIS THIN CLIENT. So I decided to do Citrix on a new 2k3 server just so I could say I've used that software. Damn do I get bored!

So I fire up the vmware on the machine I had named metaframe earlier because there was a big metaframe sticker on it. I guess these two guys knew each other in a past life, they both came from Surplus.

I pulled a snapshot of Windows 2k3 and put it into Terminal Server mode, and then his the uber-pirate web for a copy of citrix. This took about ten minutes to download, and about four hours to get installed!

After installation the software wanted four different licenses, none of whice were identified by the license manager software. I had to generate like 80 different licenses with my keygen before I could find the ones it wanted.

Then the citrix software proceded to remap the drives on my server and reboot. MMmmm tasty server. Machine comes up NTLDR Not found. Well there goes one install.

Reload from snapshot.

Tell Citrix to not mess around with the drive or application mappings. Reboot. System now complaining about the WINDOWS Terminal Server Licensing. WTF? Turns out that Citrix is hanging off of the dingle berries of MS' ass. You can't have a citrix license without first having a Terminal Server License.

I thought these were competing thin client architectures. They aren't, MS stole their software, made it into RDP and then somehow talked Citrix into being their ass buddy and requiring dual licenses.

Back to the uber-pirate web, crack the Terminal Server out.

Ooops, NCD requires you to pay to license their updates and manager software to get the current (2001) updates for this crap.

Uber-pirate web again!

I have to find and install the ThinPATH Portal, the ThinPATH Plus package and I grabbed ThinPATH X just for giggles. Wow, this would have cost me about $10,000 already, just for a $15 thin client! No wonder no one uses these things. The licensing costs nullify the cheapness.

Connect! Great! Now I have to install WMP9 and a codec pack. Yay! Audio! Sweetness by Jimmy Eat World. Try some video, ick. SpeedScreen doesn't work for shit when you only have P133 to do the compression.

Well, as soon as I get around to running a CAT6 over to my room I'll have a nice little music server. But that's gonna cost me a couple of ends, and 25 cents a pop is a bit much for the added functionality of this little monster.

I did get a nice connection to my Ubuntu server with the ThinPATH X software. It was super easy too. Too bad X doesn't have a standard for audio. I could be l33t and use Amarok for my audio and not have to worry about anything.

Gah... Power down and save the citrix server vmware machine...