Upgrade Update June 27, 2006
Posted by techgrrl in Infrastructure.add a comment
I ordered a new machine while I was on vacation. It should’ve been here by now, but the vendor e-mailed me to say it’s late. Thanks, I knew that.
When I got back from vacation, the system drive on my primary test server conked out. I made an emergency trip to Fry’s where I picked up a Seagate 7200 RPM 250GB drive. I ended up being out of commission for about 24 hours. Getting the data off the old drive was a pain.
Fry’s had a good deal on an ECS motherboard over the weekend. I don’t know that much about ECS, but apparently they’re one of the top three mobo manufacturers in the world. If you’ve never seen a mobo manufactured, check out these two articles about two different tours of ECS facilities(1, 2). If you aren’t that familiar with mobo terminology, you might check out this printed circuit board (PCB) entry from Wikipedia first.
Time to Upgrade May 30, 2006
Posted by techgrrl in Infrastructure, SharePoint.add a comment
My old server barely squeeked by running SharePoint Portal Server 2003. I must get a new machine if I want to run MOSS with any level of stability. I'm starting to spec out a new machine now. I'm really surprised at how much I can get for my money. For about $800, I can get a dual core processor, DDR2, SATA, and PCI-Express using brand-name manufacturers. These are all technologies that I couldn't touch with a ten foot pole with my old machine. (I was grateful to have AGP 2x, so I could buy an All-in-Wonder 9000.)
I spent $750 on my current machine about five years ago. It has a Tyan Tiger motherboard, dual PIII 450s, and 1GB of RAM.
Notice I didn't mention hard drives. I have new Seagate Barracudas on my current machine that I'm going to move over to the new machine. I have an old Western Digital 5400RPM that I could use as a new system drive in the old machine, but I should probably spring for a new hard drive. I plan on using the new machine for virtualization only and using the old machine for anything I don't want to run virtually.
Taking the Plunge with Virtual Server 2005 April 14, 2006
Posted by techgrrl in Infrastructure.add a comment
I decided to install Virtual Server 2005 instead of using Virtual PC to host my SharePoint server. Firing up Virtual PC every time I want to access SharePoint was a real pain, but I didn't want it running all the time either. I barely notice VS2005 running. Download Virtual Server 2005 for free from Microsoft's Web site.
VS2005 installed without incident, but I had to jump through a few hoops to access my virtual server. First, there was a 404 from IIS when I tried to access the Web-based administration tool. Then I got an access denied. Once I finally got the admin tool fired up, I had no problem associating the virtual hard drive I used with Virtual PC. And the Web-based remote control client is really slick, too. Here are some pics from Virtual Server. I included a pic of the server I used to write SharePoint For Dummies.
Now I won't have to fire up SharePoint every time I get questions from readers, so keep 'em coming.
