Wednesday, September 5, 2007

New workhorse

I have just finished assembling my new workhorse in the home office. I have a server running VMware mostly and it has been a little slow lately. But now after upgrading motherboard, CPU and memory it's a lot quicker.



The spec. for the new machine:

  • AMD Athlon X2 6000+

  • aBit AN-M2HD motherboard

  • 2GB Crucial BallistiX PC640

To keep the system quiet I also ordered a Thermaltake BigWater 745 water cooling system. The picture shows everything installed in the case.

Because the case has an unusual design with the drive bay for up to 4 hard disks in the bottom of the case I had to place the water pump on the top instead. This does the noise of the pump a little bit louder, but not too much. I have not done any real tests of the cooling yet, more information on the resulting temperatures will follow on this blog.

For the new system I decided to change the host OS as well. I'm now running Ubuntu 7.04 (Fieasy Fawn) amd64. To simplify the migration I installed Linux to a new disk and created a VMware machine from the old hard disk. To be able to boot the machine I had to change the newly created VMware machine to use IDE interface for the disk. This was a simple edit of two config files; first in the vmdk file the adapterType had to be changed to ide, and in the vmx file all scsi0 entries had to be changed to ide0. After the old machine was booted virtually I converted the machine to a standard file based VMware image using VMware Converter.