Our office has always had a bunch of network ports, and since 1993 I have been plugging in various kinds of servers, retired desktops (our first web server, in 1993, was a Mac SE/30).
With the acquisition of a nice Belkin KVM switch, I now have just one keyboard, monitor, and mouse to run any of the servers connected to it.
All those RSS Feeds Fed As JavaScript (Feed2JS) run through that sleek XServe proudly rack mounted on the table top.
MCLI Server "Farm"
available on my flickr
A tour of the mcli server “farm”, more of an agglomeration.
Starting from the left, we have “Jade”, a 1.33GhZ Apple Xserver that runs CogDogBlog (weblog plus a few more), the Feed2JS site as well as virtual hosting Maricopa eP, an electronic portolio system. The Xserve also does some QuickTime streaming, such as our examples of Digital Stories created by faculty in a summer workshop.
Below the table, the left tower is Azurite, a Mac OSX server (1 GHz) that mainly hosts project files and FileMaker databases used my our office staff. It runs as a web server just a copy of our Writing HTML tutorial as well as a smaller amount of QuickTime streaming.
The tower on the right is a 664 MhZ Pentium 2, also know as “Realgar” where I test a few new applications, run an evaluation license of Helix (Real Media server), and some things like a copy of my Kiwi Wiki.
To the right of this is a 20 minute APS battery backup. Just in case your power goes out… for less than 20 minutes. All the servers are set to reboot if their power goes out.
What is really cool is a new Belkin OmniViewKVM switch (left of the monitor), a 4 way switchbox so you can use one Keyboard, Video, and Mouse to switch between 4 computers– the nice feature here is the ability to connect to either USB (Mac) or PS/2 (the old PC) connections.
Finally, on the shelf above are 4 FireWire hard drives, used for backups of the two Mac servers with Retrospect. Each server rotates backups between two external drives.
The PC server backs up over the ntetwork to another server upstairs, which then does its own backups on a dedicated tape drive.