The Indigo Dragon, July of 2005

AMD Athlon 2600+ MHz 512 MB DDR 2700 Asus A7N8X-VM/400 motherboard WD 60 GB 5,400 RPM ATA/66 200 watt power supply 3 case fans Build: Feb. 2005 Decommissioned: Feb. 2009 Primary function: Web server

History

The Indigo Dragon was commissioned in February of 2005 to be a replacement web server for the aging and drive space constrained White Dragon. It took over as the primary web server in the middle of April of 2005, and ran nearly nonstop for almost 4 years. In February of 2009, the Indigo Dragon was succeeded by the Micro Dragon and the system was parted. It was a solid machine that had continuous runtimes of up to 230 days, and it was not uncommon to have runtimes over 100 days. The system was usually only shutdown for cleaning.

Update History

The Indigo Dragon went on-line running SuSE 9.3. In December of 2005, the 160 GB drive was given to a friend (at the time, 160 GB was not needed at all to run the web server) and replaced with a 60 GB drive. When the hard drive was changed, we switched to Debian.

The original RAM in the Indigo Dragon had issues. In late July of 2005, due to high ambient temperatures, the Indigo Dragon began to lock up periodically. I was out of town at the time, but when I returned saw the air conditioner had changed it's set point and allowed the room to reach 85 degree F. In mid October, the Indigo Dragon locked up and refused to restart--right before I had to leave on a work trip.

I had initially suspected the hard drive and put in a new 160 GB drive. But testing showed RAM issues. I isolated the bad locations in RAM and told Linux to not use a large block around that area and the system was stable again. Replacement RAM was ordered, and this time I used speced some high quality RAM with a heat-sink on the outside. After installing the new RAM, I removed the CD-ROM drive from the case and went back to the 60 GB drive. Since the system was quite small, the drive only restricted airflow. The system went back on-line as the web server in on the second of December 2005, only after I was sure it was fully functional.

Aside from the RAM issue, the Indigo Dragon has a fairly dull history. It was a reliable work horse. During a cleaning in December of 2007, I found one of the case fans had ceased up. In August of 2008, I noted the CPU fan was a little rough and could be replaced. But that's it.

Design

The low power requirement was for events of power outages. We have a large UPS and there isn't any reason we should be able to make it an hour or more without having grid power. So, this system runs off 200 watts. Originally, we had speced a 30 watt mobile CPU-- but the BIOS didn't recognize it correctly and grossly under-clocked the system. After trying all the beta BIOS releases, we attempted to contact ASUS-- which proved to be a joke. Their website continuously return SQL errors when we filled out the error report form. When we tried to contact tech support by phone, someone took the same information requested by their website. I received an e-mail some minutes latter, with the information I told them miss recorded. A day latter, I got a second e-mail making suggestions for a problem I didn't have because the tech support person didn't listen to me. I've always been an ASUS motherboard fan, but their tech support is quite poor.

The 60 gig hard drive is relatively small by comparison to most of the storage I employ, but is more then a 2 fold increases in storage from the White Dragon's 20 gig drive. The image galleries DrQue.net hosts continue to grow in size, and the web served pages went from a foot print of 2 gigs in 2003 to over 8 gigs in July of 2005. The rapid growth probably won't be slowing down any either, so the additional space will be a good thing. Before retiring the White Dragon from web serving, we were fighting for space on the 20 gig drive. Between an operating system with every bell and whistle installed and our sloppy house keeping, we were butting up on the limits of the little drive.

We selected SuSE 9.3 for our Linux distribution this time around. I'm not sure why I'm partial to SuSE, but I didn't feel like taking the time for the Gentoo route and I still hadn't looked at FreeBSD. SuSE 7.? on the White Dragon literally had years of runtime without a hickup, so SuSE has a good track record with me. We'll see if that continues.
The Indigo Dragon has a sister computer as well-- the Cyan Dragon. They both run the same software set, and the Cyan Dragon is the backup computer in case I want to taken down the Indigo for maintenance and such.