A big box, part 3

Last night, a flurry of ordering stuff on Ebay.

A PCI-e to Sata adaptor that will support two drives, £7.69
A PCI-e to Sata adaptor that will support four drives, £14.98

You have to be careful here. There's a lot of cheap adaptors that claim to have four ports, two internal and two external, but you can only use two of them at a time.

15 Sata male to female cables. £14.97

As I have things now, the Sata cable comes out of the big box and into the box containing drives. That means that if I move them, they have to be moved as a pair. Putting this in place will mean that I can temporarily unplug the drive box from the server.

A couple of male USB to female PS2 adaptors. £0.99 This is because most of my keyboards have PS2 connectors, but computers today can have only USB connectors.

A PCI-e to PCI adapter, £5.55. I only got one, because I want to see how well it works, but it will mean that I can use any of my existing PCI cards in a PCI-e slot.

The 512gb SD card that I ordered on Ebay - I got an email telling me that it's been dispatched, but the listing has now been removed and the seller is no longer on Ebay. So I'm wondering if it will arrive. If it doesn't, I'll do a claim from Ebay, but it's only £4.99, so no big deal if it doesn't turn up. Maybe it was too good to be true. And there's still the 256 gb card on its way.

So, while I wait for these things, more work on the servers. I took the drives out of an existing box and added them to the 64gb server; those are already loaded with data, that A) reduces copying and B) reduces power consumption in the Data Shed by 0.33 amps.

I now have an Adaptec PCI-e card in each of the servers. I'd have put two of them into the 16gb box, but one of the three cards (bought several years ago and boxed until now) is being rejected by the servers. So this means I can attach five drives to the 64gb box, and six to the 16gb (it has an extra Sata connector on the motherboard).

I've also been doing all the configuring that I usually do on a new install, plus I've discovered the delights of rsh, so I've installed that.

And I'm bidding on a couple of gigabit network switches. Now that I know I can upgrade individual computers to gigabit ethernet, I might use it more widely. Currently, I have a five port card, and already I want to use a sixth port!

Tomorrow, Linux Fedora version 24 becomes available. I plan to download it as soon as I can, and use it to upgrade these boxes.