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.
Sunday 6 July 2008, 5:28 AM
DebbieToo has a brother named paqman and HIT * chores
paqman (small p, yes I'm converting to *nix-isms) is a small ATX case 700 MHz P3 with 512MB of RAM and (these days) a relatively small hard drive of 20 GB. It used to be made by pre-HP-acquisition COMPAQ. Yes it works, all of it, including the on-board XVGA. Nothing's busted which I find refreshing in these days of 400 Watt footwarmer CPUs. The paqman CPU has a heatsink, no fan. The power supply has a fan that kicks full-on, off and sometimes in-between for short periods of time when necessary. Other than that it was kind-of-green when that hadn't become the latest marketing craze. Its obviously well made, my son left it running constantly for years without a UPS when he was using it.
He now has a HP 2GHz P4 desktop he brought home that had been dumped at the recycling center. All it needed was a hard drive. I dumped some more RAM into it, found a 80 GB drive that was inexpensive and he's in business running shrink-wrapped XP Home Edition installed on the system.
My daughter's P3 got trashed evidently the same time as Debbie did. I still need to find a replacement drive for her system. Discovered that she had an early and faulty version of ACPI in the BIOS. Turns out that even if you have it turned off to prevent a AC power-return restart, it does it anyway! Nice, real nice. I happened to be in the room last week when we had one of our "flash-and-trash" power events triggered by lightning that causes 3 or 4 bursts of AC power to occur. Her computer tried to reboot 3 times even after I held the front panel power switch down! I ended up having to pull the power plug out. Time to find a newer retired system.
Sometime back I mentioned that multi-tasking required or was better done on multiple machines,** here is a description of my implementation of multi-tasking. Currently my office desk, a converted armoire or entertainment center should more properly be referred to as a "network-in-a-big-box-with-a-desktop" has 4 machines. debbietoo, a DELL Celeron refurb, is going to eventually be the Samba Domain server. Sugarbear is an old P3 bought from a surplus house and is the workhorse desktop. dell2 is the refurbished DELL P4 XP SP2+ (only!) desktop. Both of the DELLs I bought about 5 years ago when it looked like prices weren't going to get any lower and they haven't actually when you consider it as a complete unit, only the CPU power inside has changed. RAM in both has been boosted to 1GB so they aren't too shabby.
paqman brings up the rear as the third Linux system. My idea is to use paqman as a utility desktop when I'm wanting to do odd things that require 3 machines, or a temporary config. His operating system image is likely to change around a lot as I try out some new-2-me Linux distros.
All 4 of the systems fit into the cupboards under the desktop/main shelf. I have a hinged open-down desktop liberally attached in various places with Velcro to hold a keyboard, a trackball and my beverage coaster. The side-supports are 2 1/8” aircraft cables, one for each side. There is plenty of room to flop open those manuals often needed late night. There are 3 magnetic latches to hold the desktop surface in the upright position when I want to close the doors and tidy up (a DTR-domestic tranquility requirement).
My only excessive acquisition for this setup was a pair of digital DELL 17" extra-sharp LCD panels I bought over a year ago. But the justification has been and actually turns out to be that my aging eyesight requires it. A third 17” panel mounted on the back of the top left desk door is used for DebbieToo. I rebuilt 3 working analog 17” LCD panels out of a group of 6 that had been trashed or scrapped out by my company. My kids have the other 2.
The networking components, the Linux firewall system, the net and KVM switches and the DSL modem are tucked in the back out of view since I can get to all of it through web pages.
I have an HP does-it-all printer/scanner/copier/fax machine that I think really sucks behind the monitors. Its slow to start up for even a black and white print. It seems to take forever to decide when its going to actually scan when asked to and I haven't bothered with trying to FAX with it except one time. Yes it worked but I never want to go through that again. It seems the only drivers available are Windows drivers. Considering how badly it works under Windows, I wouldn't even try it under Linux. My experience with HP in the recent past is that they have written some really crappy printer drivers. Its biggest redeeming virtue is that it was cheap and I could buy it when I needed to on a Sunday. Other than that it has a couple of flash drive memory sockets that are sometimes convenient.
Shelves above hold odds and ends and more of the d__n heavy books it seems are needed to keep up with this business. When the e-book/readers get to be reasonably priced then I'll likely transfer to that mode but not until then. They should be priced cheaper than freaking phone/PDAs for goodness sake, they've got one tenth the amount of electronics inside them, just more Flash RAM. I'm holding out for when they get handed out as schwag at conventions like USB flash drives are now, not really! They just need to be priced somewhere around the price of a couple of tech manuals like 100 to 120 dollars.
There are also development kits for various 8 and 16 bit micro-processors that I either use at home or at work. Cases to hold CDROMs, DVDRoms etc. Spare printer cartridges for the damn HP that seems to eat them for breakfast. A big 6 Volt flashlight for when the lights go out, not often.
The whole point of this exercise is to renovate my “office space” at home enough to allow me to work fewer days in the office. Gasoline at $4 a gallon (even in Houston TX!) and the freaking toll-road fees is eating into the budget pretty severely. I drive 35 miles each way to work so its about 2.5 gallons a day plus the toll fees at $10 a day. $20 a day doesn't seem like much but it mounts up fast especially with the collateral damage to food and power prices.
* HIT -- Household Information Technology, if you really need yet another three letter acronym.
** -- Multi-tasking is actually an often abused programming term. Think of using multiple computers as a macro (like in big) version of multi-tasking. And before the Virtual PC and VMWare fan-boys climb all over me, this is AFFORDable Multi-tasking. I use Virtual PC 2007 at work and its great on a P4 Duo running at 3GHz with 4 GB of RAM! I just can't afford to buy the horsepower and machinery to make it work well at home. Yes a P4 will run Virtual PC BUT you wouldn't want to have to do it past lunch.
Wednesday 2 July 2008, 3:58 AM
DebbieToo, a new Serverbaby, is running.
Installed Debian 4 (etch) on Debbie's hard drive and this time I did it the easy way. My DSL line is twice the speed it was at the time I started this whole thing. So it loaded and installed almost faster than installing the CDROM ISO version of SP3 on one of the XP systems I did today! It definitely installed faster than the executable version on the Virtual PC XP image. Took about an hour max. I didn't think to time it but considering I loaded it on a 2.4 GHz Celeron and the SP3 installs were on 2.8 P4's and a P4 Duo at the office it was considerably faster taking into account CPU speed and performance. Certainly fast enough to avoid the isolated thunderstorms we were getting today!
This time I loaded mostly server functionality with a Gnome desktop and IceWeasel. I'm hoping that the feature set of FireFox3 gets added to IceWeasel soon, since the Windows version works so well.
Samba3, like the last time, came up running as if nothing was wrong. I'm going to be very careful this time and set it up slowly and with careful planning.
The Disk Manager looks very nice and I think they have improved the look of the GUI. I'm also pleased to see that it will mount and read NTFS5 partitions, even on USB flash drives.
This install version is running faster, the desktop is much more responsive. I don't know if that is a result of me limiting what got installed or not.
More to come on the new adventures of DebbieToo.
Wednesday 2 July 2008, 2:58 AM
SP3 Mania
In these first 2 days of the week, I've managed to install XP SP3 on about 4 different systems using 3 different SP sources, on-line, using the ISO and then using just the executable. In all cases it installed perfectly fine even the one I installed on Virtual PC 2007 image. No $40 routers in the path though!
Tuesday 1 July 2008, 11:54 AM
The third strike finally landed. Debbie got hit.
I've run out of things I can do to fix her. I keep getting the same error message, #100. I still haven't found a way to manually or automatically patch what's busted with dpkg, apt-get, aptitude or Synaptic. I've used su and gedit to get into the files and try to re-write some of the settings but I haven't found enough documentation that is clear enough, at least to me, to be sure I'm not breaking more than fixing the system.
The symptoms remain the same. Samba and SWAT are busted with version and dependency conflicts. I've tried turning them off. It seems I can't un-install them. There is obviously a lot I need to learn about Debian Linux. Unless I can figure something out in the next few days, the plan is to copy off all the stored files onto DVDs and wipe the system and start over. The two critical components are Samba and some sort of update facility. Right now apt-get seems as busted as Samba.
I wrote that last night, now its 4AM local time. I'm up courtesy of the very noisy thunderstorm that just blew through town.
I've re-started all the systems, Debbie included. She didn't restart. Even with a UPS to isolate the system something must have gotten through before I shutdown the systems last night.
Unfortunately a constant online UPS the size I need (approximately 3KVA) is out of the budget and I've been using the stand-by battery backup sort of UPS. My previous experience has indicated that they just don't deal with thunderstorms as well as they should. That is why I have been shutting the systems down when I know storms are about. The battery backup “UPS” is decent for switching transients and similar events on the AC mains but not lightning. We've been having little micro-cell storms that are coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. Yes summer has finally started. The rains have been warm and the winds from the south. This most recent batch of storms the last few days has been an expensive experience.
One of them evidently took out Debbie, the system drive, hda, has been trashed. It manages to get about half way through the boot process and then hangs.
So in the interests of getting a working Linux server system back up and running, I'll do a complete re-install. I probably should have done that anyway. I still have a working Linux desktop system, Debbie's little sister, SugarBear was turned off and avoided getting trashed. The linux firewall is still running obviously!
My daughter's Windows XP Pro system has a dead hard drive but that was only a matter of time, it has a Hitachi DeathStar PATA drive in it and and it was one I resurrected from the trash at work. I'll get a “new” one and drop an image I've kept onto the replacement drive. I fixed my son's XP machine last week and it seems to still be running. My home office XP Pro development workstation is ok. BTW none of the XP machines are running SP3, they've been patched up with SP2+ to within the last couple of months but I've learned my lesson! If I decide to update them to SP3, updates after that will be direct connects to Windows Update website.
Now I have to find my Debian CDROM collection and start building DebbieToo.
Sunday 29 June 2008, 6:34 AM
A $40 CONSUMER-class router has created SP-Update-Hell.
Believe it or not I don't work in IT, haven't for 7 years. Yes I work with Microsoft's Windows XP Embedded and as a result I have to know a lot about the OS, the kernal, Win API calls etc. But I don't have to support networking day in and day out. So I've gotten a bit sloppy maybe. My test system at work uses a Lxxxsys Ethernet router to separate my test systems from the internal corporate network. Mostly so I don't create chaos for the IT guys but also because that's what we've unfortunately been using in the field. For at least the last 4 years. Mine is probably one of the early ones, I don't know for sure. I also have one of them at home. Do they have the same firmware? Probably not. My home router has wireless 802.11b/g on it, the office routers are CAT5 only.
All of my SP3 tests were done behind one or the other of those two routers. Turns out that others in the company are also using the same sort of routers (they can order them from inventory) for similar reasons and having similar problems.
Here's the scenario as it plays out. Using the router, you update your system to SP3 by either downloading it through the router using Windows Update or you do like I tried to do in the beginning and use an ISO or the packaged EXE file for the SP. It doesn't matter which scheme you use, they all fail to successfully install any more patches or updates or Internet Exploder 7, period. They will download but they will not install. Interesting.
You can update SP2 with all 99+ patches offered and everything works grand. They download, they install, everything is peachy. Just don't put SP3 on the computer.
You take the router out of the picture by-passing it and patching around it and setting your IP to match the once upstream network, everything comes down and installs perfectly. The settings in the router do not have any restrictions on connections originating inside the LAN on the router just like Windows Firewall (which BTW was off for all of these experiments). You can connect to anything and do ftp, http, https, ntp, dns, smtp, pop3, imap, etc. no problems. But once SP3 is on the box, updates don't work from behind the router.
I have not done enough experiments or net-sniffing to figure out what exactly was going on, but I will.
There is a surprise benefit to this scenario. We didn't want anybody in the field doing Windows Updates on our rental computers. Now if we get them up to SP3 before we send them out, we can keep them there since the units in the field can't get past the router!
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