Home Server Projects

I received this email via the zdnet.co.uk webmail today and I thought it would be more appropriate to answer here so jayaram I hope you come back to read it...
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----- Original Message ----
From: jayaram
To: Xwindowsjunkie
Sent: Monday, 28 July, 2008 1:10:00 PM
Subject: SP3 and 40$ routers?

hi,
Not sure if my earlier comment got through- Zdnet made me register to comment and even after that I cannot see it!.

But coming to the point- Can you try out the steps at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943144 on one of the affected machines and let me know if that worked.

If not, can you let me know more details of your setup and logs at jayaramk@microsoft.com
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Actually neither of the two scenarios listed in that knowledge base article have anything to do with what was happening or at least that is the way it appears to me, so no I won't try either of those two “fixes”.

The original setup was a bare metal install of a volume license copy that had been slipstreamed with SP2 and then updated to include 99 Windows updates after the installation of Windows Pro SP2. This was to create a production image that could be used by my company's rental operations staff to refurbish fleet computers used in the oil field. It also happened at home as well but that wasn't a critical issue. I use Debian 4.0 mostly, the XP box is secondary. The plan was to have a OS image with SP3 already installed on it.

The install was done from a CDROM image created by WPE after the slip-stream up to SP2 status. The updates were installed by using Windows Update through a LinkSys router that was eventually routed through to the corporate Internet connection. No I don't know the specifics of the routing etc. What I can tell you is that after all the SP2+ updates, I re-booted the computer every time it was required or even suggested by the OS message boxes. Each time the system came up without any errors or hints of issues.

The Media Player 11, the dotNet 3.0 update and the multiple language packs were not installed.

The updates for SP2 included a WGA "update" and an update to Windows Update itself that was listed after most of the 90+ updates were previously installed. I rebooted after those 2. Additionally I added dot.Net 1.1 and dotNet 2.0 as optional components since the system release I'm working on requires dotNet 2.0. Those were added before the WGA and the Windows Update patches were installed.

After that it looked like SP2 was as far as it could go, Windows Update suggested that I install SP3 and that was where I was heading with the whole system, so I did. It was at that point that things fell apart. SP3 seemed to install fine as far as I could tell. The system ran fine and the computer did not hesitate or crash. The updates web site indicated that there were some post SP3 updates to install so I downloaded those and let them install and at that point they would not successfully install. When I retried this step, the computer didn't try to download them, it would go straight to installation and then report failure. No I don't remember at this point specifically which updates they were but there were only 5 or 6 and they all failed. I wiped the drive and re-started with the SP2 CDROM again.

I had downloaded SP3 as a standalone exe , as part of the ISO and as a Windows Update download/install and got exactly the same issues each time. Each time the failure point post-SP3 was when I tried to install the downloaded updates after installing SP3. SP2 updates downloaded and installed fine each time I tried the process or a variation of it. It was only after SP3 was installed that things went to crap.

Before you email me back, the specific router I used is now part of a landfill somewhere most likely. Its been nearly 3 weeks since the issue got resolved. Patching around the router fixed the problem or at the very least removed it. I currently have a slip-streamed and updated SP3+ volume license image that seems to be working fine.

Each time I started with bare metal, did the CDROM install and then the WIndows Update process each time.

You can tell the yo-yo's that designed that Service Pack that you've effectively doubled the workload for a number of people with the requirement of removing IE7 before install of SP3 AND having to have already installed SP1. Service Packs used to be complete and inclusive, you guys blew it with this one.

And don't get me started with WGA. Yes I agree that your company has a right to protect its property but the manner in which it was done is the most aggravating piece of crap I've ever had to deal with.

I have not updated my home XP Pro computer past the point of SP2 plus the 99 updates and I probably won't since it seems to do it I'll have to replace the router. When I get my new Linux firewall up and running I'll probably use it to connect the Windows box without the router in the path and do the updates but not until then.

I have not been able to take the time to net-sniff the whole transaction process and see what the router didn't like and since I don't work for Microsoft I'll leave the router testing to ya'll. I've already gotten bitched at for taking too long on the image project. I hope to deliver that this week and then I'm on to something else.

BTW: the posting jayaram refers to is dated July 2 2008, a lunar month ago.

Mary Foley is following Rupert Again.

Earlier somebody here wondered in print what it would be like to be MS CEO. Now maybe we ought to wonder what we could do with $200 million of MS' advertising money.

I suggested in the comments to Mary Foley's column that maybe I ought to let Microsoft "buy my vote". I wasn't greedy. I wanted just a small piece of the pie, like parity with the IRS. It was a weak moment but as I've noted the current US administration has already done that with their "economic incentive" tax check kickback scheme.

Assuming you have the stomach for it, everybody in the EU could get in on it too with Microsoft if they wanted.

Just an idea.

There have been some hurricanes that have hit Houston square-on, Alicia in 1983 and Allison in 2001.

Alicia was notable for the damage it did to buildings due to the high winds. All the high-rises downtown had their glass walls blown out. Even emergency personnel stayed away from the office buildings because of the constant rain of shattered glass. In the city and suburban areas house roofs and backyard fences were either ripped off or flattened.

Allison did most of its damage by flooding because it just sat in one place in Galveston Bay and rained continuously for days. Particularly on the southern side of the city and those areas with bayous or creeks nearby, all of them were under 100 year flooding levels.

Lucky for me I was out of the Houston area both times. So preparing for hurricane season is a standard annual procedure in this part of the world. We've been on the edge of numerous other hurricanes at other times. At least you can prepare in advance for a hurricane unlike earthquakes and other natural disasters.

My family's home is about 40 miles from the Gulf Coast, literally 2000 feet south of the southern edge of Houston. The local elevation is about 45 feet above sea-level. I don't have to worry about high tides but we do qualify as low-lying territory. During Rita our suburban city was part of the evacuation zone.

During the evacuation, incredible numbers of people were stranded on the highways going north after running out of gas. Rita changed directions in the last few hours and came ashore well east of Houston, negating the need for evacuation. It was 3 days of total panic flight-driven chaos that probably caused as many deaths as a hurricane would have. The difference from an actual hurricane event is that the deaths and injuries occurred on congested interstate highways where emergency personnel could not get to the people in need. So if you are going to evacuate the area, you needed to be on the road and headed north BEFORE they announced the evacuation.

Since it seems unlikely that I will be able to foresee where a hurricane will land in enough time to avoid the chaos on the highways, dealing with it sitting in place is something that has to be prepared for.

Something else learned long ago, sitting in the dark, is that the power utilities' repair priorities are not going to be set by the lowly residential utility user. Katrina and the near miss of Rita (at least for Houston) reminded me again that the power utility companies don't have the manpower needed to quickly rebuild the electrical infrastructure on the Gulf Coast. Some residential areas in New Orleans took 6 months to have power restored. I understand the need for setting public service or repair priorities but I don't have to like where it puts me on the list! Self-reliance has become a necessity if you want to prevent having to stand at the rear of the power restoration queue.

Actually during a power outage, keeping computers running is not my highest priority. Trying to maintain some measure of a working household is much more important. Last year I managed to find enough cash to buy a 5.5 kW 120/220 AC generator and a bunch of 5 gallon gas tanks. That should keep the refrigerator, some lights and a small AC going until the power can be restored assuming it only takes a few days. Obviously the reefer's contents will be the first post-storm meals in the case of a long-term power outage. Then it gets turned off.

It might seem extreme to use a generator to keep a small AC unit going but it will be obvious after a day or two of 100% humidity @ 95°F+! Having sweltered for days in more than one post-storm event, its not just physical comfort, its mental and physical health as well. If there are family members that are disabled with chronic illness, having some air conditioning in at least one room to keep them comfortable is important. A number of fatalities in New Orleans were simply hospital patients that expired from heat stroke.

My parking lot near-encounter with lightning was just one of the almost daily small-cell thunderstorms that herald the beginning of hurricane season so the computers are being turned off a lot. I just didn't get them turned off at all the right times. I suspect that Debbie's hard drive got trashed during this particular storm cell.

Unfortunately I don't own very good UPS technology. The UPS in use here is essentially a low-current battery charger, a battery and an AC inverter run off the battery when a power fault is detected. Generally its good enough but the best UPS type is the constant on-line charger\inverter system combination. They are expensive simply because you're talking about twice as much circuitry as in the typical battery-backed up inverter only system. Because of the cost competition at the low-end of the UPS market, most constant on-line systems start around 3 to 4 KVA in capacity. Usually those systems are usually about 50¢/VA. That translates to $1200 to $2K just for a full UPS backup system. They are worth it in mission-critical systems but a home server and network system built out of castoffs doesn't really qualify!

I didn't have an automatic software backup system in place yet for Debbie so I was burning DVD-Rs once a week to keep recent copies of the file shares. (Yes I know I could have written a cron script!) I just hadn't gotten to automating the process yet when this year's spring/summer monsoons started. The DVDs were exactly what I needed though to get things up and running again after Debbie got trashed by lightning, or at least that's my assumption as to why the hard drive was damaged suddenly.

Thinking about emergency preparations has me planning for the possibility of having more than an occasional hard drive crash. Obviously making full drive images of all of my family's computers is the first step.

Do I want to store or package a completely built-up computer system in a water-tight case as a backup? No laptops will not do. Laptops do not like water at all! Obviously building or buying something low-powered like the OLPC XO is an obvious start. But to be honest I'm not sure how critical a computer will be post-hurricane.

Something that I haven't tried out yet is trying to operate a standard PC off of my generator. Is there a way to successfully power a computer off the generator without destroying the computer? I do know from my work that small generators such as my recent purchase aren't very well regulated.

The on-line UPS units we buy at work are specially modified to work on drilling rig site generators that are better regulated than my home generator. The kind of UPS I have at home doesn't operate off a generator very well, especially alongside a variable inductive load like a refrigerator or an AC unit!

A few minutes looking at color doppler radar through a web site connection either local or statewide tells me more than listening to the local TV “reporters” standing in the blasted rain ever do! Damn Dan Rather!* There is a local color doppler radar sited about 15 miles away with a website so you can look at specific neighborhoods in pretty good detail. So there have been more than a few times when a computer was more informative than a TV or a radio.

The wireless broadband service is still so new, I'm not sure if you can rely on it during or after a storm. In addition, the service areas for broadband wireless cells are so small that the local access point is as likely to be in the same power service area as your house. In any case, cell phone service usually saturates during emergencies and becomes nearly useless.

Cable television and the digital data service they offer is not a real option. At least in this area, you get 6 inches of rain, kiss the TV cable good-bye.

We subscribe to a satellite television service so we'll still have the Weather Channel but only BEFORE and AFTER the storm is over!

For use as an emergency 2-way communication device, a computer is going to have to have a phone company wired DSL or dial-up connection.

Telephone service has been remarkably reliable. Even in the worst storms the phones seem to continue to work. I'm hoping that extends to the phone-DSL service as well. Along with radar coverage, email would be useful to still have access to.
Our home's phone service is a buried phone line that comes up at the corner of the house to a termination box. Luckily the first phone cable junction box is in my own backyard so I should be able to either connect or re-connect if necessary to the phone service and DSL.

Continuing my phone cable trace, there is a second junction box located about ½ mile away that I know directly connects my phone service to the switch at the local central office. This inter-cable junction box is on a slightly elevated concrete platform so it shouldn't be flooded even under much worse conditions.

From there the phone cable remains buried until it enters the switching center, about a ¼ mile further. Telephone switching centers are powered by large 48 volt battery banks. That is how they manage to continue to operate even in general power outages. All of this is good to know but I hope never to have to test that knowledge in some disaster scenario.

I hold an amateur radio license and the radio equipment I have (really old) still works and could be used as well if necessary. Prior experience though tells me that aid agencies here in the US view amateur radio as useless and will not expend time and energy attempting to work with even willing amateur radio groups. Likely my HF radio equipment would be used to “jump” past the local aid groups and communicate with other radio amateurs outside the disaster area that will be operating in ad-hoc networks.

The key to all of this communication ability is going to be an AC to 12V DC lead-acid battery charger. Every communications gizmo I have operates off of either 12VDC or alkaline or rechargeable nicad or lithium batteries. I can build a power supply system to run a PC off of a 12VDC battery so that might be a means to engineer around the question of a generator run PC. Another project!

Something I've also avoided to this point in my discourse is the question of using solar cell arrays as a post-disaster power source. Solar cell arrays are expensive, bulky, fragile and if not protected will likely be totally destroyed in a hurricane. I have done some solar panel testing but their cost has been so high I've not been able to afford them. The advantage is that they require no fuel other than sunlight. Eventually they will become part of the system assuming I can engineer a mounting that allows easy disassembly and storage of the panels.

This time of the year I maintain a fairly traditional hurricane kit in my house. A couple of large plastic boxes containing: large flashlights, batteries of every type, first aid supplies, candles and matches, 3 large bags of charcoal, plastic tarps, 3 or 4 rolls of duct tape, a hammer and nails, other basic tools, a crowbar, a wind-up AM/FM/Weather radio, bleach, rope, extra dog and cat food (yes we have 2 of each), etc. Most of the time the kit just sits there. Additions and deletions get made to the kit. Usually batteries continually disappear, I have 2 kids after all. This year I'm trying to make sure every necessity I can think of will be either at hand or in the kit. In reality, the hurricane kit is a means to plan for emergencies, all kinds.

As a mental exercise I go through this sort of assessment each year. Sometimes more detailed, sometimes less. Its the most important part of the hurricane kit. Its a way to both actually prepare for the worst as well as steel myself to an actual event. So far I haven't had to preform under the gun for awhile, lets hope it stays that way.

* Dan Rather got his big break and moved to CBS by standing in near waist high rain flooding during hurricane coverage for a local station in the early sixties here in Houston. Since then, every idiot reporter that does hurricane coverage puts on a plastic raincoat and stands in the wind and rain to do their stand-up. Duh! They look like idiots every time.

I've been looking at a very interesting variant of Linux called Damn Small Linux, (hereafter called DSL). Its 3 major contributors have basically taken a minimalist approach to Linux and have created a system that can provide a basic desktop running on an OS that's right around 50 Megabytes. To enable more functionality, they have created a means of temporarily mounting “extensions” that are basically modified Linux applications like OpenOffice and other apps.

There are a number of ways to run DSL. The Official Damn Small Linux Book comes with a LiveCD that also has the means of burning a customized-by-the-user version onto another CD, installing it on a USB flash drive, running it in a VMPlayer window and another way of running it is in a cmd window under Windows! Needless to say its very intellectually beguiling simply because it offers an excellent way to operate small SBCs or old CPUs with Linux.

I have played with it a little bit and its amazing how fast a 600 Mhz P3 can run when its not having to drag around Windows baggage or a large Linux OS install. There are a couple of user interface issues that take a little getting used to. A right click on the desktop opens up a new menu of applications to run in place of a menu bar across one edge of the desktop. You'll get over that quickly when you see how fast the application will pop-open.

One of the means of operating DSL is as a RAM drive image. This allows for a fixed read-only operating system image that flat-out can not be written to. A second RAM “drive partition” is set to be the data storage and user profile settings record. The system image can simply be restored by re-booting the computer. For industrial applications this is the dream system setup. The user is allowed to make whatever temporary setting changes he wishes but they get wiped and replaced with the default setup on the next boot. Perfect!

Because the size is so freaking small, it should run on a relatively new SBC with 1 GB of RAM like a scalded dog!* Now all I have to do is figure a way to optimize our company's applications to operate without having to write to the read-only drive image. Yeah I know. I've got a lot of work ahead of me. Its going to be interesting to get a operating system and installed application image below 200 MBytes again.

* Please don't "rat" me out to PETA. Its only an expression!

Excuse me if I sound stupid but consolidation and virtualization could be two separate processes or system management criteria. Depending on the application, having a SQL server of some type or other could conceivably serve multiple database applications. Consolidation could be as simple as just moving a database application(s) onto a partially utilized SQL server and not require any virtualization at all.

Likewise virtualization might allow for some special applications to run that don't have heavy usage or limited appeal. Like using a backup server as a network monitor for instance.

I have seen tremendous amounts of IT-spam recently in the last 6 months advertising, announcing or proselytizing virtualization software. And yes its going to be the browser wars all over, especially if they give it to us free and expect us to buy either support or "enhanced performance" professional versions. Snake oil all of it.

Yes I have used Virtual PC 2007 and tried VMWare and they are fine for what they are and do. But no matter how you cut it, there is a cost of power that can be associated with every bit and byte forced through a Hypervisor/virtual machine/root kit or OS. The CPU is going to run hotter and harder and probably won't last as long. Yes you might save some money by combining tasks or applications onto fewer servers ONLY if you haven't ALREADY installed them onto their own servers. If the servers are still running, do they really use that much AC power and cooling to justify replacing them with something that will run hotter and cost more? Maybe you should have replaced or shutdown those servers and applications already?

What's it going to cost to buy a high powered server, install an OS on it, install a hypervisor (huh? Since when is that a software application or component?) and then install all the not-so-virtual OS licenses onto the system? Then test it to make sure it doesn't bring down the entire house of cards you've made by putting multiple applications onto one system. You want to try and monetize that and then justify it to management? Try generating/calculating a legitimate ROI for an application that doesn't evidently see much usage. If its significant enough to be more than 1% of your total system bandwidth or gross product, I wouldn't screw with it. If the application is generating more than 1% of your business traffic on the network or Internet, you might want to seriously consider mirroring or clustering instead of using virtualization.

If it's generating less than that, WHY RUN IT AT ALL? Give your customers a copy of the software and show them how to run it locally on their server and then offer a remote service contract to maintain it if you have to.

If you're worried about security threats from it, GET IT RE-WRITTEN to eliminate the threats.

I am amazed that the latest buzzword or fad software becomes an answer to all sorts of questions that should have more intelligent answers than just shoving it into a virtual machine.

If the code is buggy, it stays buggy on the VM.

If its a security threat, that doesn't change much either. How long do you think it will take for the malware miscreants to find holes in MS or anybody else's VM software and take advantage of it?

I think that like Vista for Microsoft, virtualization has become the cash-cow everybody can own. All they have to do is buy some software or hire some programmers for the project and then white-paper/advertise the crap out of it and then bingo the cash starts coming in, no Microsoft required. Now Microsoft wants a piece of the market.

The mechanism all of the virtual-fan-boys use is a survey.

One of the problems I have run into answering surveys is that the preset expectations or mindsets of the testers has a tremendous impact on how well designed the survey is and how effective it is at soliciting meaningful and unbiased data. I have given up answering the damn things because its obvious in most cases that the selections set as possible answer choices in most cases will force or bend the survey to a specific goal.

The flood of babel-speak is tremendous. Grab a bunch of buzzwords jam them together in questions that sound more like pick one from column A and 2 from column B and poof you have a tech-geek survey. Its like picking or writing your own set of benchmark tests to demonstrate your CPU is better than a CPU from somebody else. Likewise I don't bother reading the reports from them any longer for the same reasons.

Combining virtualization and consolidation in the same answer selection block prevents finely defining or allowing the difference between the two. Consolidation doesn't require virtual-anything in all cases. The reason I jumped on this specific phrase is that I've seen this combination cited or offered as an answer in more than one survey in the past and more recently as word-fodder in an article promoting or announcing the (now 2 week old) potential release of a Microsoft Hyper-Visor management tool.

The biggest source of Hype in the Hyper-V is probably located at 1 Microsoft Way. So all you salesmen and IT product spam-masters out there take your white papers and shove them into ...... into file 13.