Building the Perfect PC

Chapter 4. Building a SOHO Server

One day in early 2004, our server started making funny noises. It was no big deal, as it turned out. A bearing in the supplemental case fan was failing. That was cheap and easy to fix, but it got us thinking.

Our server, that anonymous beige box where all our data lives, was an antique. As we blew the dust off it, literally and figuratively, we took stock of the hardware upon which so much of our working lives depended. An ancient Intel RC440BX motherboard. A Slot 1 Pentium III/550 processor with 128 MB of Crucial PC133 memory (we could have sworn we’d upgraded that to 256 MB). A 10 GB 7,200 RPM hard drive that Maxtor had sent us for evaluation before that drive was commercially available. A Travan tape drive from Tecmar, a company that departed the tape drive business years ago. And Windows NT Server 4. Ugh.

Although we’d made a few minor upgrades—including mirroring the 10 GB Maxtor to a larger Seagate drive—we realized that we were several years into the 21^st century and still depending on a server that dated from the late 20^th century. That was good in the sense that a server should be so reliable that one simply forgets it’s there. And, despite all the nasty things people say about Windows stability, that server often ran for months on end without a reboot. That’s what happens when you build a machine with top-notch components, put it on a good ...