How I bought memory for my compact home server

I think I wrote a while back about getting a used Dell Optiplex 960 Small Form Factor (SFF) computer to use as a compact home server which runs Debian Linux. It is an excellently built machine of enterprise grade. One cool feature which is almost indispensable for running it as a headless (no monitor) home server has been the Intel Active Management Serial-over-LAN (SOL) feature which provides a console over a second, dedicated IP address similar to what those serial consoles did in data centers in the past.

If the machine experiences boot problems (which it has occasionally) I can always access the SOL console to diagnose boot issues. In order to connect to the SOL console it is necessary to install a highly useful administrative utility called Open Manageability Tool.

I managed to get one of the quad core (most are dual core) Optiplex 960 SFF but have needed to get more memory for it. It is theoretically capable of taking up to 16 GB of non-ECC PC6400 DDR2 RAM in its 4 slots, however the cost of 4GB modules of this type of memory is ridiculously expensive.

So instead I have opted to get four 2GB modules instead for a much more reasonable price. But the trouble was being able to find this exact type of memory on eBay because the vast majority of memory in that category which is available is in fact ECC (error correcting), not non-ECC. Unfortunately the ECC RAM will not work for this non-ECC system.

It was a challenge to filter the search results correctly to only see listings for the type of RAM I needed. Here is the actual search string I used. I list it here just because its kind of interesting how something like getting memory can involve stuff like this.

The actual search string:

8gb ddr2 -AMD -server -laptop non-ecc -“2x 2048MB” -“2gbx2” -“2gb x 2” -“2x2gb” -“4x1gb” -“4 x 1gb” -“2 @ 2gb” -“4 @ 1gb”

This is not the first time I’ve used an elaborate search string to filter out a lot of stuff I don’t want to see in result listings on eBay. It would be interesting to see a collection of other elaborate strings people have used to find things.