Home Server Projects
I've always been interested in installing servers for home use. The ability to customize Linux based servers to the degree that surpasses what is economically available from any other source makes Linux the obvious choice. Linux also offers the home user more latitude in that it will support practically any other desktop operating system with basic services.
Tuesday 24 July 2007, 7:29 AM
Its been quite some time....and Now Debbie has some sisters
At this point my 2 to 3 week experiment has gone way over time but things are still progressing although the pace has slowed considerably. Biggest problem is getting time to work on Debbie and her sisters.
I've been doing some configuration tests with NFS and Samba trying to find the best mix of settings and permissions to allow both server systems equal access to the shared folders. I don't want Linux to override Windows and vice versa. So I've been playing with the server and a couple of Debian client boxes I set up and a couple of Windows clients, one running XP Pro and the other Win98SE.
I've also been toying with the idea of running some services like streaming content on a second subnet and perhaps over 802.11G wireless instead of the main wired 100 baseTX network. Especially since my son seems to think that Internet "radio" hiphop with music videos and Youtube is way cooler than real radio or broadcast TV.
First time I've felt like there's a bandwidth squeeze inside the house, usually my complaint is with the service coming into the house from the phone company.
Speaking of the phone company, we've been getting hit with pretty nasty thunderstorms with Ark building torrents coming down for hours but not days! Service from the phone company has been non-stop except when the power went out completely for very short periods. Then it didn't matter since the CPUs were off anyway. This leads me to a totally unscientific observation, Debbie and her two sisters didn't even hiccup when they got "dumped" by a couple of short power outages. Systems came right back up and didn't need any intervention on my behalf to fix themselves. The Win98SE box required a reload and the Win XP Pro box had to have chkdsk run to fix some clobbered sectors.
PreviousComments on this post
You don't say what filesystem your Debian boxes are running. A good journalled filesystem -- ext3 or ReiserFS -- will be more or less immune to power cuts. While NTFS has journalling on its own structures, it doesn't for the data itself, hence the need for a chkdsk on your XP box.
Not that any of these technical details should really be exposed in something like a home server -- particularly if they're going to appeal to non-techie users.
I installed the default ext3 on the Debian systems. The designated server "Debbie" on the Celeron has been running for over 2 or 3 months (I can't remember when I really started running it) and her two sisters, both P3's acting as clients, just got installed last week.
Yes the Windows XP Pro box is running NTFS5. It doesn't make any sense to not run it on a XP computer. The alternatives Fat16/FAT32 don't even come close in reliability (not that NTFS is that great but its better than FAT anything).
As I've told many around me, when IBM built their first 14" drive platters for the 360 system, hard drive storage was called "Temporary Storage" and it still is. Yes the storage densities have gotten greater but the drives still only last 3 to 5 years at best. Carnegie-Mellon and Google have proven that to my satisfaction. I always wondered why my car battery and the hard drives at home seem to run for about the same amount of time! They always stop working when the event is the most personally aggravating!
I used to work in the video business and the biggest problem video tape had at least at the beginning was that they used an organic glue to hold the oxide on the tape. Various bacteria found that glue to be absolutely delicious and would eat the glue right off the tape. Especially in the southern portions of the US. A little humidity, a nice high ambient temperature and the lifespan of 2" broadcast tape could be measured in days. Some of the 8" floppies that came out replicated that big mistake.
