Thanks to everyone that showed up Saturday to plan the execution of this project.  There were six members in attendance.  For those that couldn't make it, we had a great response and a lot of interest in and questions about RAID arrays and what made them worthwhile for a server, the type and amount of RAM we would need and what kind of power supply/case and CD or DVD drive.  The discussion was interesting and enlightening for several and as such was worth the effort.

However, just as we were beginning to make some decisions about these things and how we might procure them, in walks Vance Pals with a Dell Poweredge 2400 server (complete) in tow.  The server sported 6 - 18GB hot swap SCSI hard drives, Dual (redundant) power supplies, SCSI  CD Rom, SCSI 50GB OnStream tape drive, 2GB Ram, Ethernet controller, modem, RAID controller and many other things to sweeten the pot!  Oh, did I mention dual processors?  OK, they are Pentium 3s clocked at 800 MHz, but for our purposes, that's OK.

Initially, we could not get the box to boot, but after perhaps 1/2 hour of inspection and trial and error, we had the RAID controller and disks configured into two separate 38 GB arrays consisting of 3 drives each and configured for RAID-5 for speed and redundancy.

Instead of using our Windows Small Business Server 2003 trial software (which would expire after 180 days), Vance had brought with him a full version of the Premium edition (that includes SQL Server).  After configuring and scrubbing the arrays, We started the Windows installation and by three O'Clock we had the first of 5 CDs installed and had done a re-boot and initial logon successfully!  This seemed like a good place to hold for the day so we left the machine running and waiting for configuration and disks 2-5.  It was a real temptation to scrap other plans for the day and continue with the installation, but alas, families and other plans won out.

The next session is planned for Sept. 6, 2008 at the resource center from 10AM - 3PM.

Hope you can make it,

Al Hill