about REELRADIO: Our Server

[October 25, 2000, updated October 1, 2002]

Picture of Server
The REELRADIO SERVER ("moondog"), above, front panel closed, and below, front panel open.
Picture of Server, front open
Typically, every machine on a network has a name. Our new server was named Moondog, because it worked for Alan Freed. Moondog passed many tests before it went online. We are pleased to verify that LINUX is a very powerful OS on premium INTEL hardware.

All components of the REELRADIO server were received and assembled the last week of May and the first week of June, 2000. The server was built on a standard 19-inch wide steel rack-mounted chassis that is 24 inches deep and 3.5 inches (2 rack units) high. The chassis (built by BOOMRACK) includes a 330 watt power supply and a total of 4 fans (not including the CPU fan) which operate continuously. The front panel can be opened for access to the system power switch; the panel can be locked.

We used an INTEL L440GX+ server motherboard with a PENTIUM III (256K cache) operating at 700Mhz. (This was a dual-processor motherboard; a second 700Mhz processor was installed in June, 2001; both were upgraded to 850Mhz processors in February, 2002.) 512 megabytes of 8ns RAM is installed. The motherboard includes onboard IDE and SCSI controllers, video and LAN ports, so no additional interface or controller cards are needed. That's how it all fit in 3.5 vertical inches.

Picture of Server with front panel open and top off
The REELRADIO SERVER ("moondog") with the top off.

The original configuration had 96 gigabytes of hard disk storage on four hard drives, to allow data redundancy and backup. The two primary drives were SCSI-2 Ultra-Wide 160 MB/s QUANTUM 7200 RPM drives with a total capacity of 18.1 gigabytes, each. The secondary drives are MAXTOR IDE (ATA/66) 7200 RPM drives with a total capacity of 30 gigabytes, each. And a CD-ROM unit is accessible from the front panel to allow installation of the operating system and applications.

We upgraded the hard drive storage in moondog on September 28, 2002.The original SCSI drives were replaced with SCSI-2 Ultra-Wide 160 MB/s IBM Ultrastar 10,000 RPM drives with a total capacity of 36 gigabytes, each, bringing the total storage capacity to 132 gigabytes.