Low-Rent Cluster - Hardware and OS
I picked up a 800mhz Pentium III server in a 1U case on eBay for $175+shipping to kick this project off. It's got 256MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. I already had an external firewire drive enclosure, which currently has a 20GB IDE drive in it. Keeping with my tradition of server naming, this box was christened "snowmane."
Here's what snowmane looks like in the rack:
The box has two USB ports on the motherboard, but no firewire. I picked up a basic PCI firewire card from the local CompUSA. The system's single PCI slot had a Freevision capture card in it, so that came out, in goes the firewire card.
There are two Intel-chipset ethernet ports built into the box. I'll use eth0 for the regular connection, and eth1 will be for cluster interconnect. Video is basic XGA, and snowmane is hooked up to my kvm in the rack.
next - OS install