Today we bought one of IBM’s brand new x206 Intel servers for a client. These beasts are new to the market, replacing the older x205 entry level machine. We’re among a handful of Perth people to have them, and ours was shipped via air freight from the East.

It’s a really well specced workhorse, especially considering the price. This box has a 2.8GHz HyperThreaded Pentium IV processor (which means that an SMP Linux kernel will think it is a dual-processor machine), 512 MB of RAM, dual 160GB SATA hard disks mirrored on an Adaptec RAID card. It also has dual network cards, with the onboard adapter having gigabit capabilities.

This machine cost all up about $2,500, but that’s not the best part. All of the hardware is supported with the 2.6 kernel that ships with the new Debian Installer. The onboard RAID controller didn’t seem to be supported, but I gave it about 5 minutes attention. There’s probably a boot argument I could append to make it work, but seeing as the client has paid for a seperate RAID card, I figured we should probably give it to them ;)

We bought seperate Seagate disks (IBM wanted to charge twice as much for half the capacity) but have since found a problem. The design of the server incorporates a front-accessible cage where the drives are mounted with the SATA backplane. Silly me didn’t buy/order any seperate disk caddys, and now the disks are sitting there precariously. And I won’t even go into the heat issues… It’s a good thing we have three cradles on back order from IBM’s Spare Parts department (one extra, so we don’t have this probme again when they get another disk).

This is the only problem, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own (I guess the sales people could have checked if I needed them). Ohh well, live and learn.

The machine will run Sarge, with a full X11 install. Both Gnome and KDE get installed when you choose to install the “Desktop” components through tasksel. It’s the first time I’ve used X on a server machine :)

At this price, it makes it a very affordable application server. This one will be running the internal office systems (the susual suspects; Samba, Cacti, iptables/NAT) including a Copper deployment we have modified.

Now I can’t wait to compile a new kernel, and see what this HT processor can do!