[Server-devel] OLPC Uruguay - Building an XS system

[Tony Pearson]

Hey Everyone,
Sorry I haven't been on the list for a while, but I would like to thank 
Greg Smith for bringing me onto a new
project:  OLPC Uruguay.   He's asked me to post our progress on building 
an XS server for this project.

We will be hosting this machine in the USA, and having myself and admins 
from Uruguay administer it
remotely.

My first task was building the machine from parts, based on specifications 
from Greg, Wad and others.
Here is what I put together today:

(1) Started with an ASUS Barebones System (V3-M2A690G) which has nothing 
but a black-and-silver tower 
case, AMD AM2 socket motherboard, and power supply.  It came with one IDE 
master/slave cable, and one
18" SATA cable.  The motherboard has 8 USB ports, built-in 10/100 Ethernet 
NIC, firewire, and multi-card reader.

(2) I added an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor and fan assembly.  For 
those not familiar with this process,
it is not something that has to be done correctly.  I watched several 
videos on YouTube before I performed this
myself.

The Athlon 64 X2 is two core, each core is 2.3Ghz.  For about $30 less was
the AMD Sempron single-core 1.8Ghz, but the salesman talked me into the 
faster processor.  Both would probably
do the job for our purposes, so I erred on the safe side on this.  I had 
verified that Fedora 7 supports both.

(3) Next was the DIMM, the motherboard supports 533, 667, and 800 speed 
memories, and they were all the
same price, so I got a single 800-speed 2GB DIMM.  The motherboard has 
slots for 4 of these.  The trick is
figuring out which slot to put it   There are two yellow and two black 
DIMM slots.  I called the store, and they
told me to put the single DIMM into the slot closest to the motherboard. 
This appears to work fine.

(4) Next were the NIC cards.  Greg wanted 3 NICs, there is one built-in to 
the motherboard, and two extra
PCI slots for additional cards, so adding two more NICs worked.  I got the 
RealTek/TrendNet 10/100 PCI.

(5) I got a Lite-On DVD-RW burner.  This comes with both BLACK and BEIGE 
face plates to match any
tower case.  I changed the DIP switch to be "MASTER" instead of SLAVE. The 
IDE on the motherboard
has two cables -- one for Floppy Disk, and the other for Master/Slave.  In 
theory, you would have the HDD
on Master, and the DVD-RW as SLAVE, but since my HDD will be using SATA 
instead, I went ahead and
made the DVD-RW the MASTER.

(6) Instaling the HDD was a bit difficult.  The Barebones system put the 
"Card Reader" in the middle of the
3.5" bay, and I have two 160GB SATA drives, so I put one above the card 
reader, and one below.  The
Barebones system came with ONE 18" SATA cable, and I had purchased two 
extra 24" cables, just in case,, but the
problem was that there was only one SATA (black) power cable.  I am going 
to have to see if I can get a white-to
black (IDE to SATA) power converter cable adapter.  There were four SATA 
connections on
the motherboard, and I could not tell what was SATA 1, 2, 3 or 4.  two are 
red, and two are black.  I guessed
wrong, as my BIOS tells me I have one HDD in SATA 4 and none in the other 
three slots.  (the second
drive is installed, but without power or SATA signal cables attached).

(7) I also ran out of screws.  The Barebones system came with a few 
screws.  The DVD-RW came with
its own screws.  The HDD did not come with any screws, so I used up the 
ones from the Barebones sytem,
and was left with only two to put the case back together.  I will have to 
go back to the store to get more
screws.

Just to test out the system, I booted from an Ubuntu 8.04 LiveCD and ran 
the memory test.  This takes
a while, but I want to make sure all the systems are running properly. The 
processor and fan seem to
be working, the DVD-RW is able to read my LiveCD.  It appears I might have 
to fix the SATA cable
problem to put it on SATA 1 or it won't let me access the HDD.

The Barebones system motherboard comes with Hardware-based RAID-1 
mirroring, so that two
drives will contain identical contents as a form of built-in backup.  In 
the event either drive fails, the
system will continue running from the surviving drive.

It also supports RAID-0, which combines the two drives into one big 320GB 
by spreading the
data back and forth between the two drives.  This can improve performance 
but would mean the
entire system fails if either drive goes bad.

The store is closed already, so the best I can hope for is a trial install 
on a single drive, that I would
then wipe clean when I get the extra power cable needed for the second 
SATA drive.

Tony Pearson
Tucson, AZ - USA
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