Got another Pentium 4, old Micron Client Pro

Shinobi · Post by **Shinobi** » Sat Dec 11, 2010 12:14 pm

Have not seen these in a long time.. Pentium 4 Micron Client Pro. They used to be owned at one point by UniSys.. I think. I have never seen a used computer have such a clean motherboard before... spotless and dustfree.. very well maintained.

I installed a 1 GB of memory in it. It has a 1.6 GHZ cpu in it. I installed Linux on it for the operating system and have it running Samba, VNC and SSH (as it is going to be headless). I put a SATA PCI Controller card into it and have two, 250GB drives installed. I also have close to 700GB of space on external USB drives attached to it. This definitely is going to work great for a file server. I'm also going to install a Gigabit NIC card into it.

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Sat Dec 11, 2010 3:13 pm

I've pretty much just dedicated a external 2T drive for data backup and I'm just tunneling through the home network of all my Win7 PC's.. makes things safe,secure and uses way less power than another machine dedicated to it.

CableDude · Post by **CableDude** » Sat Dec 11, 2010 4:01 pm

How many extra boxes do you have shinobi?

Shinobi · Post by **Shinobi** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 2:06 am

Sava700 wrote:I've pretty much just dedicated a external 2T drive for data backup and I'm just tunneling through the home network of all my Win7 PC's.. makes things safe,secure and uses way less power than another machine dedicated to it.

With the way I have things setup now. I have my normal incremental backup. Then I have redundancy x 2 for full backups after that. in separate locations. I'll take the extra protection vs the extra power consumption any day out of the week for protecting my data.

Shinobi · Post by **Shinobi** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 2:25 am

CableDude wrote:How many extra boxes do you have shinobi?

Here is what old Shinobi has...

Now granted, there are not on at the same time. And when they are in the spring/ summer, I have power management on to cut down the heat when they go into "sleep mode". Also I have two 17 inch LCD monitor. Two KVM switches on each monitor.. so two computers on each monitor.

I have my old Athon 1.7 GHZ box as a Windows 2003 domain controller and intranet Sharepoint server.

I have a Pentium 3 with Debian 5.0 running Apache for a web server. I also run a packet sniffer from this also from time to time. As well as some security vulnerability scans from this box.

I have a Dell Pentium 4 which I use to record my own music on. I have usb midi keyboard hooked to it and also a guitar vamp2 module hooked up to it. I also listen to streaming audio (radio) on this one. Used a I-pod head phone "splitter" wire in the sound card jack, to hook up 2 sets of computer speakers on the one main jack for fake "quadraphonic" sound

Also netflix.

I have my AMD Dual Core 2.0 GHZ box which I mainly play games, surf, email do web design and also do the incremental backups on.

Then I have the other Mirco client pro P4 that I do the full backups on. To both internal SATA drives, then to the USB DAS drives.

The computer down stairs is running a AMD 2.0 GHZ , my Wife and guests use that one to browse on. The printer is shared on the network.

I also have Acer Laptop Intel 2.0 GHZ. Surf and watch netflix with that one.

I have a Nintendo Wii, love watching the netfix on that one.

I have QoS running on all of them and on the router to smooth the network out a bit.

Some people laugh when they know that I have old computers, but I use them a lot and get the full ROI... especially because they are free.

More to come, I am certain.

CableDude · Post by **CableDude** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 8:16 am

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 11:34 am

Shinobi wrote: I'll take the extra protection vs the extra power consumption any day out of the week for protecting my data.

Sounds great the way you have it all hooked up.. very nice, but I guess even if you have the same level of protection and less power consumption would it still be a factor?? It's rare I keep my external drives on, I flip the switch when I need them such as when I wanna drag some photo's the ole lady has loaded from her camera to her comp to a special directory on one of the externals, same goes with some other important documents. Doing this gives me the ability to just reach and grab the small things as I may need to run out the door..ya never know. I even upload the pics and important docs off site to a server not located on the property. You might want to consider doing this, since what would happen if a fire broke out??

Shinobi · Post by **Shinobi** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 4:46 pm

Sava700 wrote:Sounds great the way you have it all hooked up.. very nice, but I guess even if you have the same level of protection and less power consumption would it still be a factor?? It's rare I keep my external drives on, I flip the switch when I need them such as when I wanna drag some photo's the ole lady has loaded from her camera to her comp to a special directory on one of the externals, same goes with some other important documents. Doing this gives me the ability to just reach and grab the small things as I may need to run out the door..ya never know. I even upload the pics and important docs off site to a server not located on the property. You might want to consider doing this, since what would happen if a fire broke out??

The main thing that I keep on is the Windows server 2003 box. I have a bigger APC UPS running now and that box is on it, plus the external drives are on the APC UPS as well. Regardless, I also do not keep the external drives on all of the time either. If I go anywhere I usually bring my laptop, and always bring two USB Thumb flash drives with all of my daughters pictures and movies that I have taken over the years.

I would be sad if I lost my data, but I would get over it.. I would be devastated if I lost her pictures and movies. So that's the most important thing when I travel. Off site storage is all the number one rule of backing up any data.