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In addition to recently setting up a new Gentoo server at home, I also just recently got a new workstation at $work as well.

$boss recently purchased me a used HP DL580 G1 server from eBay as a test box. It wasn’t quite the specs I thought it was going to be, as it turned out to be a G1 system, but it’s still pretty decent.

Up until yesterday, my Linux workstation (at $work) was a Compaq workstation (2.4GHz, 768MB RAM, 40GB HDD) running Fedora Core 5. Yesterday, for some unknown reason, I got on some wild kick and decided to completely rearrange my office furniture (not easy when you have nine computers in your office). In doing so, I set everything up so that I could replace the Compaq workstation with the DL580 and make the DL580 my primary Linux workstation. (I have an identical box running XP on my desk as well.)

I now have a badass Linux workstation. I think it’s a pretty sweet setup, anyways. The CPUs are only 700MHz with 1 MB of cache but there’s four of ‘em, which adds to the “coolness” factor. It’s got a respectable 3.5GB of RAM, which should be plenty. There’s a total of four SCSI drives in it, and I have them set up in two logical volumes. There’s 2×18GB drives in a RAID1 configuration (for the O.S.) and then there’s 2×36GB drives in a RAID0 configuration (for some virtual machines). Lastly, it’s running Gentoo, which makes for a badass setup.

The 18GB RAID1 volume holds the operating system and all the filesystems except for one. The 72GB RAID0 volume is mounted at /var/lib/vmware/ to hold my virtual machines. It’s not my ideal configuration, but I’m going to need the extra space that I’d waste if I made the second volume RAID1 as well, but more on the virtual stuff later…

As part of reorganizing everything, I also got rid of an extra monitor that was taking up some prime real estate on my desk. I use the Linux box for just about everything that I can, and also use the XP box when I absolutely must, e.g. for running Outlook — by the way, Office 2007 is pretty sweet as well, IMO. I did a nice little setup using synergy so that I could share my keyboard and mouse across two physical machines with two physical monitors. I elected to do away with that and make use of the KVM $boss picked up for me a while back. Now I have both the Gentoo and XP machines hooked up to the KVM, but I hate having to switch back and forth just to see if I have new mail and such. Fortunately, I already had remote desktop enabled on the XP box (so that I can get in from $home and such), so I emerge’d tsclient on the Gentoo box and just keep a remote terminal to the XP box open on an extra virtual desktop on the Linux box. That way, I can just click and check to see if I have any new mail.

Anyways, I’ll stop rambling. I really like the new setup, though. I’ll post later what I’m doing with the virtual stuff…