Home Server Projects

The “leak” of the preliminary build was so obvious its ridiculous. Especially when new OS features are highlighted that would make the techno-savvy respond positively. The XP Pro virtual-machine operating mode is one that business and “power-users” would be interested in. It certainly looks attractive to me. Typical home users probably won't be interested in it. Though when I think about it, it's more like a business requirement than a feature.

According to the “leaks” and corroborated by at least one MS marketing person, the Virtual PC feature is going to only be offered in Ultimate and business versions of Win7. So the initial “leak” was deliberate. There will be more "leaks" to come.

At this point the only ones running Win 7 Beta are the uber-geeks and employees of companies that are needing to evaluate and test Windows 7. The intensity and transparency of the “leaks” looks like some of the out-of-work political spin doctors are working for MS now, or MS is using the political trial-balloon play-book.

With the large number of blogs and news stories, Microsoft marketing department is executing the beginnings of a “buzz” champaign for Windows 7. The websites and magazines have about done all they can bashing Vista so its time to clear the deck and make way for the pre-release Windows 7 non-paid advertising campaign. Make it look like a leak and the writers and editors will publish what you want them to for free.

The middle of October is about 6 months away. For computer manufacturers that's about as late as you'd delay manufacturing a new product for sale during the lead-up to Christmas. My guess is that the Release Candidate coming out May 5th is likely to go inert by the first week of December. That would give it roughly 7 months like the Beta has with its demise in August. It will also allow the buzz to continue almost all the way up to the late Christmas sale season.

The stockholders should be pleased. It practically guarantees new income for Microsoft before the end of the year. It will generate at least a bump up in the stock price. DELL and HP are probably ready for something to sell besides Visaster.

What will be really interesting to see is what the sales of Win7 "shrink-wrap" upgrades and full version versus Vista look like in the weeks and months after the release of Win7. That might be a real measure of how much Visaster was liked or disliked.

I stuck another hard-drive in Debbietoo and installed Debian 5.0. Actually got it to boot-up enough times (2) to start configuring the desktop. Discovered that the video driver had the resolution set to 1600 x1050. Reset the resolution to 1280 x1024, the native resolution of the rebuilt LCD panel. Yes I'm running debbietoo, my household server, with a Gnome desktop. Its been handy more than once. Now X-server reports a "fatal" error on boot up and won't allow a GUI bootup. Thankfully the error message is self-referential. I tried another CD copy of the Debian 5.0 download, checked the checksums and re-installed. No dice, same issue.

Pulled the CD-R out of the drive and put a Ubuntu 9.04, Jay-Jay CDR in the CD drive. Ran the install. System comes up. Desktop logon works. Gnome starts without complaint. All the GUI tools seem to be working fine. System is setup with the new grub. It triple-boots without complaint. Now I can boot either into Debian 4.0 etch (2 kernel versions) or Ubuntu 9.04 without problems.

Winner and Desktop-weight Linux Champion of the world? Ubuntu 9.04!

Its been an interesting day. I have a print server now running Xubuntu 8.1 on the P3 SBC but its not running on the compact flash and its not fully configured yet. Lack of space on the 1GB compact flash required the use of an old 10GB PATA drive. It took considerably more work than I thought it should have taken to install a “server” distribution. Definitely not a shrink-wrap project.

I ran into a few issues related to my choice of hardware. The chipsets related to the Pentium 3 didn't get universal support from Linux hardware-driver programmers back when the P3 was the pinnacle of x86 silicon. So the video that's running is 800x600 16 bit color @56 fps, under the generic Xserver driver. It seems to top out at 800x600. 1024X768 would have been more appropriate for a generic sort of driver even in the P3 days. The video adapter on this specific SBC is an integrated module built into the SIS chipset.

I'm fairly certain that most of the drivers that managed to install are the generic x86 “plain vanilla” drivers in the distribution. Eventually the print server will operate headless so I'm not too worried about the video adapter. Other functions may work sufficiently well enough not to require replacement with specific drivers.

What I've run into here has happened before. Using discarded legacy hardware makes a project more of a challenge simply because if it didn't get the driver support when it was new, its not likely to be in the Linux distributions now. When this particular SBC was current 6 to 7 years ago, Linux wasn't in the plan, it was going to run Windows XP Embedded and the Windows drivers seemed to work reasonably well.

The amount of heat generated by the P3 board was in the vicinity of 35 watts which doesn't sound like much until you realize that the box it goes into is made of stainless steel, totally sealed up and going to operate in 120 degrees F (49 C) ambient temperature with full sun exposure in the tropics. Assuming it continues to run non-stop, that's what makes it an industrial rated SBC. You go in hoping that you can get 3 years out of the board before it fails. Something breaks eventually. This one had the COM channels go first.

Because the system it was running in required COM ports and RS485 connectivity, it was toast. It got yanked out and replaced with another board. If the board is past warranty, it is actually cheaper to totally replace the board. Repairs made to surface mount boards are cost prohibitive when you add in the post-repair testing that will need to be done to re-qualify the board for service again. If was just a USB port that was bad, it would likely have been put back into service after a test or two. So running as a print server in a air-conditioned home will be a very nice retirement for the old P3 SBC.

The P3's future operating environment @ 500 MHz is going to be a lot less stringent. It still will require a CPU fan and ventilation. My guess is that it may only have to print 10 to 15 pages a day, worst case. High performance isn't going to be the issue. Mostly I need to have something that will allow me to keep my Windows XP Pro box shut-off most of the time.

Is this project cost-effective? Probably not. Educational? Definitely yes. I've learned that I need some more Linux-time to really know what I'm doing at a command prompt running configuration scripts. GUIs are too easy to use to get some things done. It also would be nice to know exactly how and what I need to put into a minimal server configuration.

Services needed for the print server:
NFS – Network File System, because without it, Samba doesn't work.
Samba – to allow connects to and from Windows based clients.
Samba's WINS and DHCP servers so I can keep the Windows clients isolated from the Linux net.
cups – the printer service.
HP printer management software
Apache2 for access to Samba and cups through swat
CRON and AT for scheduled tasks
FFS2 – flash file system, a CF plugged in the socket seemed to suffice to get it installed.
APIC services of some kind to enable the hibernation/suspend functionality.

This project has taken a somewhat twisted tortured path.

Targeted hardware is a tossed (or redundant) P3 industrial ETX SBC with two dead COM ports and 256MB of RAM in a single PC133 stick. The USB 1.1/2.0 ports still work. The goal was to install everything into a small Compact Flash on board (built-in socket) so that there are no moving parts outside of the CPU fan. No monitor, keyboard or mouse. The two Ethernet ports still work although the RealTek one is far superior to the SIS chipset-internal E-port. One reason to use this junked CPU is that it can be dialed down to less than 500 MHz to further reduce the heat.

I decided not to use Windows XP Pro on the P3 board since it seemed to be a massive over-kill for something fairly straight-forward and simple. Maybe too simple. Besides I know Windows XP Pro will run in 256MB but its not going to be very happy and the swap file will eat a 1/4 of the drive if I have to run one.

I had problems at first getting both Ubuntu and Xubuntu to install (from CDROMs) in graphic mode with a displayable resolution even though I tried 2 different LCD panels. This problem caused me to start muttering about the bad-old days of Linux X-server woes, and so forth.

After that, I decided to use the text-mode install of the command line version of Xubuntu from a CDROM iso onto a 1 GB compact flash. Whoops, not enough drive space, even for the server configuration. WTF? Has Linux gotten that fat?

So at this point I'm downloading the ISO of the server version of Ubuntu 8.1 to see if I can jam that onto a 1 or 2GB CF. To be honest I'm not sure about it, the ISO is 637 MB, just shy of a fully-packed CDROM. De-compression will probably make it about 900 Megabytes, still likely to fill the CF once all the formatting and so forth is done on the CF.

Power has been out for the last 2 hours or so. The other end of the street is flooded above my car's bottom door seam so no driving around for me. Since I was stuck in the house I thought it might be a good idea to see what it takes to crank back up to the mode I was operating in during IKE.

You know that old observation that when you make the last payment on the car and the warranty goes out, everything starts falling off the car? Well yesterday I made the last of the three insurance-reimbursement payments to the roofer finally after wrestling with the mortgage company to get my insurance money back and which I received the day before. So of course today is the first day "post-warranty"!

IKE and his collateral damages are still a very fresh memory. My re-shingled and repaired roof is about a month old, maybe. Yeah buddy. I just can't wait for the next hurricane to come visit. I still have 2 tons of downed tree trunks, limbs, etc in the back yard.

Today winds were blowing about 60 to 80 mph and the roof seems to be OK. My own little part of the house refurbishment was to rebuild the porch roof and its almost done. I haven't had 2 dry days in a row and a weekend to be able to properly cover the plywood with shingling, so it leaks here and there. But its better than it was a month ago.

One thing I've learned in the interim since IKE is the joy of owning an air compressor and a framing style nail gun. Without that pair of tools, no porch roof. Yes sir. No more swinging a 14 oz or a 1 1/2 pound hammer for me.

I'm very happy to report that the 5.5KW generator is running just fine. The refrigerators are happy. The new UPS I bought seems to like running on the generator as does the old P3 equipped Xubuntu computer and LCD panel, so I'm kind of set for the next hurricane, I think.

The hurricane box needs replenishment for the usual consumables, batteries, blue tarps (the unofficial flag of hurricane damage solidarity) and a couple of new rolls of duct tape etc. I might want to buy a few more AC extension cords. (With the recession now an acknowledged reality, its not so amazing to see how many roofs STILL have blue tarps on them.)

So over-all a decent rehearsal. Now its time for the power company to do its rehearsal and turn the power back on. We'll see what happens.

Update: Power is back on after about 2 ½ hrs, not bad actually. Never fails. I saw the power company bucket truck at the usual power pole where the local branch breaker is located. That was of course on my way back from buying 15 gallons of gas for the generator! Ha!