If you happen to read my Blog, you will know that I’ve started a project to build a home server that more or less mimics the sort of server I use at the office. And while I’ve have had the parts for a few days, in fact, assembled on the first day, following some basic photos, I have not really begun to operate it.

During the weekend, a fellow blogger Connor announced, rather twittered that they had their home media server assembled and running. At first I thought he had beaten me to the Idea, but his is more for home Media, MythTV, rather than IT practice and development. And then he was hit with the first rule of IT regarding new equipment. “Don’t count your systems until they have burned in“.

Which is what happened, his system failed due to a common phenomena in IT. Either the equipment starts and runs for 100 years, or it dies in the first couple of days. Infant Mortality is one of the most common effects of new IT equipment and usually means you can never commit time to the new system for several days, up to a week until you feel safe with the system. During that time you can test it, stress it, but don’t count on it. Then when you are happy, erase your testing environment, and load the real installation.

So hence, I’ve been a bit patient and deliberate in my new system. So far the BOXD945GCLF2 (also known as the INTEL D945GCLF2, or Little Falls 2) motherboard has been performing quite well and the OpenSolaris OS has found and configured all the hardware I attempted to use. The board is currently mounted and operating in a Antec Minuet 350 Case.

And I’ll write and photograph this more later, needless to say that while this is a small case tailored for the microATX D945GCLF2, the board itself is nearly lost inside as I’ll show you later.