Home Server Projects

I've spent a lot of time building a couple of websites for some friends.

I'm trying to become reasonably proficient in yet another programming language.

I've been writing an automated configuration program only to have the “customer” completely change his mind when the software was ready to be delivered. Now he wants to name the computers in a completely different manner. The program specifications now requires the user to be able to read AND type at the same time. Something I've never suspected possible by some of the field technicians, at least at the same time.

All of this requires relatively unrestricted Internet access.

The phrase “at the same time” has come up quite a few times in conversations, television and website advertising and of course blogs. Being on the trailing edge of technology at home has helped me ignore a lot of the commercial drivel out there. Ignorance is bliss. I was totally unaware that AT&T iPhones were unable to web browse and maintain a phone conversation at the same time and Android phones can do it. (Or do I have that turned around?) Big whoop-de-do. Obviously I don't own either.

Actually I'm not really sure why someone would want to do both simultaneously. Outside of jacking in a Borg-ish headset or going to speaker-phone and treating your nearby humans to your potentially private conversation, I'm not sure how you could actually do that physically on a small handheld device. The phone companies love it I suspect since they can charge you twice for the same airtime-minutes. Throw in texting and they can charge you three times. I know. I get the bills.

Simultaneous operations is a server's raison d'être. Of course my 2 kids use the Internet at the same time in their rooms. And of course they watch or listen to 2 different websites, never the same thing, of course. However, I've noticed when I remove my earplugs, that they seem to at least listen to similar cuts of music over and over again and watch the same programs, if not the exact same episodes. The network connection gets maxed out quite often. A formula that a proxy server with storage might help relieve, since the old man has to share the connection with these 2 local mass-media black-holes.

Since they seem to often watch episodes in the same shows, I could possibly setup some sort of “subscription” and download the shows ahead of time when the network connections are semi-idle, midnight to next-day noon on weekends and 2 or 3 in the afternoon before they get home on weekdays since they're teenagers. That leaves the network connection more open when I want unrestricted access.

This is going to take some research. Proxy servers in the past made note of webpages visited and kept copies of those pages. I'm not sure how to trigger a download of a program that hasn't been seen previously but is accessible through the same page visited repeatedly. Call it a pre-proxy. Yes there are DVR type devices out there but its not just video I need to grab and temporarily store. Although I've seen predictable media behavior, they are teenagers.

* pronounced like "hmmmm".

Part of the work that's been keeping me busy the last few weeks have been involved with evaluating Windows 7 Embedded and/or the final released version of Windows 7 Pro, Ultimate, Business, Supreme (whatever). The ambivalence is because I don't think it buys me much of anything I don't already have with Windows XP Pro or Embedded.

The Quebec CTP 2011 is Windows 7 Embedded and I've been working with it trying to determine if there is anything my company might gain by using it instead of Windows XP Embedded. Not much.

However if Microsoft wanted to truly create something worth buying, they might consider the idea of merging Windows 7 Ultimate-Whatever with the Embedded product and allow customers the option of “building” or compiling images using the Quebec infrastructure. Combine that with a “license” to build up to 5 images, the customer then could put as much or as little as wanted into those 5 systems.

If Microsoft really wanted to make things work well for their stockholders, they would put it on a subscription model, allow customers to download upgrades for a fee to their licensed systems.

The Quebec ISO is practically a live DVD image. It will install itself and put what the customer wants on the system compile. It calls home to the mothership and gets registered. It requires an Internet connection.

Yes the customer of this particular version will need to be more knowledgeable than the typical Joe Sixpack BUT Microsoft does has a fairly high percentage of those since Windows has been around for a long time. I could see it being an attractive package for Windows wonks. It might even boost sales a bit by appealing to the techno-snobs and Windows fanbois. They'll just have to have it.

(You know if you ignore the word Windows, it sounds a lot like Linux, if you get rid of the stockholders.)

I've been fairly busy the last few weeks and some of it was because Ubuntu 9.1 served up a unexpected & nasty surprise. It will not load properly on a DELL Dimension 2400 desktop. This particular model is somewhat ancient as computers go BUT it still is a Celeron (P4 class) running at 2.6GHz with 2 GB of RAM. I am loathe to replace it because it has been extremely reliable for over 5 years now. It works about as well as anything with a near 3GHz processor currently available save the dual core CPU's.

I have tried installing 9.1 using two methods. One was the on-line in-place upgrade from 9.04 to 9.1. The other was a full install ISO image. Neither method worked, both crashed on the next boot after installation.

At first I thought it is was an issue related to grub but that wasn't the problem. Increasing RAM size also wasn't the issue. The original 512 MB memory was twice as much as required minimum. One GB of RAM didn't help resolve the issue.

The really annoying thing is that a trashed install of 9.1 kills the previous installs like 9.04 on the same disk. Even selecting previous installs or the recovery options crash.

I suspect the Intel 845 chipset is the issue, in that I've installed Ubuntu 9.1 on later model chipsets and not had any problems. I've backed up a few steps, wiped the drive and re-installed 9.04 on it and everything is running again as well as it was 2 or 3 weeks ago. This particular system is my “server”. Lots of backed-up files on large hard drives. It cannot be unreliable.

The primary reason I have invested so much time and energy into Linux, Ubuntu in particular, is to wean myself and my household off Windows. Especially now. The price for Windows 7 shrink-wrap significantly approaches the price of a new hardware platform. The economics get even worse when talking about buying refurbished computers. Putting Windows 7 Home Premium on a salvaged computer system makes even less sense.

What has been damaged more than anything else is my trust in the Ubuntu programmers and test engineers. I had gotten to the point where I believed that installing anything from Ubuntu was not going to be an issue requiring lots of remedial work. It was stable, able to install on practically anything without crashing. That trust has been severely damaged.

There has been a lot going on. I've been trying out CTP 2011 “Quebec” from Microsoft, its basically Windows 7 Embedded. Now I know how various OEMs have been able to demo Windows 7 on all the netbooks that suddenly popped up. Consider the Windows 7 Embedded CTP to be like a "live-DVD" type of installation tool and you'll have the basic idea. If you take out pieces of Win7 that you don't need or want, you can lighten the OS load considerably. The smallest image with some networking I was able to make was about 500 MB. More on that later.

Win 7 Embedded is an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp. The OS is so freaking fat that it really doesn't make much if any sense to use it as an “embedded” operating system. As a touch screen enabled bistro table “information appliance” yeah, I'll buy that idea. Something to put inside a handheld or portable device? No and no way. Putting it in netbooks with Intel Atoms, or Via C7's maybe, they'd be slow. Windows XP though would be a better choice, and Win XP Embedded even better.

I suspect that a large amount of the fat in Win 7 comes from supporting old, really OLD applications. As an example I found edlin.exe in the system32 directory. That in itself was funny since the original edlin was a 16 bit LINE editor in MSDOS. It pre-dates edit.exe, another MSDOS editor, also in the system32 directory. Adding notepad.exe and write.exe makes 4 text editors in one folder. Is that really necessary?.

(Before you jump me, yes I know edlin.exe is still in XP Pro etc. When was the last time you HAD to use edlin? Did you really want to?)

There are runtime packages for C, C+, C++, VB5 and VB6, old MFC etc some of them pre-date Win95. ODBC database connectors for Access 95/97 databases, dBase3, and Paradox. Support for OS2, its limited but there.

Iexpress.exe, an application-installer-packager from the Windows 3.1 era also has an system32 “update”.

Most of the Win7 fat though is semi-hidden in plain-sight. Portions of the operating system have to be written in such a way to support either the old applications directly or through the application compatibility add-ons Microsoft has patched onto the various versions of Windows. Ntvdm and wow (Windows on Windows) are examples of application patching, hosting or shims embedded into Windows. I appreciate the fact that Microsoft wants to support everything they have ever released (except maybe MS Bob!) but come on, can't that stuff be supported in a download and only on the users' systems that need it?

Since Microsoft has stopped supporting MSDOS, Win 3.1 & 3.11, and WIn9X directly, why continue to support them in the new operating systems?

Hook Application Compatibility into Windows Update and use that to download the appropriate packages to support the old stuff the user has to continue using. There already is a side-by-side mechanism setup for the DLL hell of previous Windows NT versions. Something similar can be done for the old stuff, especially the 16 bit stuff.

How about MS making their Virtual PC software into something that does the legacy support? Its an extension of the idea of Virtual XP Pro stuff going to be done in WIn7.

Think of all the plug-ins that users have to download when they go web-surfing all over the Internet. Its not like the users don't already download most of the junk on their computers already.

Most of the people I have had to fix their home computers don't make back-ups and lose their installation disks so when they go out and buy the latest version of Windows Whatever, they end up buying new software anyway. This new software seldom needs MSDOS and 16bit Windows support. So why leave it in the OS as part of the piles of detritus that hardly ever gets executed?

If you want another argument to remove this un-needed dross, think of system security. All of this old compatibility software sitting on the system has a very large and exposed surface to malware writers. At present most of the compatibility software hasn't been used much to attack the host 32 bit system but its an attack vector waiting to happen. If the software wasn't there reliably on every Windows system that would be one less way to hack into or around system security. In other words, the 16 bit legacy software is not on the system UNLESS the user downloads a compatibility package, until then it wouldn't present itself as such a tempting target for future malware. If the malware guys can't count on it being there for use then its not a viable means of attack.

Had an interesting day today. Call it either an example of planned obsolescence or an instance of deliberate system design but I ran into one of the biggest issues of proprietary operating system software.

For a customer's installation, we needed to buy a new rack mount server to replace a failed system. At first I was told that our newest software based on Java would be running on it. No problem. Just get Windows Server 2008 R2 since the server was coming from DELL. DELL recommends Windows (even when the customer doesn't want it). Actually Windows XP Pro SP3 would have sufficed. The new server would be replacing a previous 1U server that had been running Windows XP for nearly 6 years when it finally cratered. That's a phenomenal length of time for oilfield computer equipment.

I was mis-informed. The customer reports that they are using really old legacy stuff based on VB 5 & 6. Oh yuck. And that generates a problem. Turns out old VB5 & 6 software running old unsigned Active X components will not run on Server 2008 (“Visaster” server without the eye-candy). Not in WoW. Not in ntvdm. Not at all. I had message boxes popping out all over the place. I had to try to make it work. I was amazed that Server 2008 would actually let me install the software in the first place since the installer program was from the same era.

This is one of those situations where using a virtual machine could solve a problem caused by an incompatible operating system. I was tempted but I didn't bite the apple. This particular server system will be located on a drilling rig off-shore who-knows-where. The techs on the rig are fairly astute and have handled complex computer issues before. But asking them to learn a new technology just because the current OS cannot run what the old OS could is too much.

The system got “downgraded” to Server 2003 (XP Pro-like) and everything not only installed but ran without complaint. Since the system will be running behind at least 3 layers of managed routers and is on a private VPN supported intra-net it should be fine, I hope.

That kind of trade-off happens in the real-world. Microsoft knows that happens. You can't force your customers to upgrade their systems if they like what they have running. What would be wrong offering for sale old Windows operating systems with absolutely no warranty? If you read the current EULA you're not getting anything anyway from Microsoft even on the latest iterations or builds of Windows. As far as tech support goes, we don't even bother to call MS since it takes practically a “verbal hurricane” to elevate their attention.

What is wrong with selling old versions of their OS is that the old operating systems have so many ways to be compromised that botnets would be even worse than they are now. So in this instance I have to agree with Microsoft. Don't sell or install the old stuff but sometimes you don't have a choice.

I feel uneasy delivering something I know is broken and has been cracked by malware malcontents hundreds of times. When you “own” the operating system instead of just “leasing” it, you can better control the effects obsolescence, planned or otherwise, has on your corporate bottom line. I would have much more preferred to have installed a Linux based server for that very reason.

(endorsement) As to DELL tech support, I was pleasantly surprised. It took wading through about 6 or 7 phone voice menus but I did get some help. It turns out the Raid driver required was on a third disk. Quick and easy fix. (/endorsement)