My marital situation having changed, I will be moving at the end of april. This as more or less put a freeze on everything related to the website. However, I have a lot of projects for after the move, so things are likely to change on this front after the move.
I’m hoping the http://arduino.cc/ boards work out like I hope they will. Going to buy a kit after I’ve moved to see what I can get it to do. Planing to add some automation to the house.
I haven’t updated the site in a very long time. Mostly, because there as not been much to write about. Everything as been stable and I haven’t had any issues with the new system. While the wordpress blog is too heavy for anything serious, I am leaving it on for now.
Capsule as been performing all of it’s roles very well since I have put it in place. No crash and very solid performances.
Sonofboo, however, is a big noisy, being a rather old machine. Due to changes in sleeping arrangments, I now shutdown the server during the night, as the noise it makes make it harder to sleep. Sometimes, I forget to switch it back on when I get up. Capsule, however, runs very silent.
Vmware is no longer supported in the official gentoo tree, so I will need to look into using the overlay to get it working. Unfortunatly, the current vmware overlay is broken, so that is a no-go. I may look into doing a manual install after the holidays, depending on how everything progresses in my personal life. This would allow me to completly decomision sonofboo.
Another possibility is the replacement of the current capsule motherboard and cpu by something newer. This will, however, need to wait until after I have moved.
I started hunting around for old computers I could use to replace my dead server. Unfortunatly, all my tests using single CPU systems were less then positive. Using a vmware router, even on a 4Ghz Pentium 4, turned out to be very impractical. The old dual cpu P2@233Mhz handled it better. The single cpu ment I had to deal with frezes in connection if something started demanding lots of CPU on the system, even if it had lower priority. This made running updates on the base OS a real nightmare.
Then, I found an old HP E800 at a local computer shop. No one there had managed to get it to boot and the owner made me a deal. If I could get it to work, he’d let me have it for 100$. So, I took it home and had a look.
The machine as 2 Pentium 3@800Mhz processors, 1.1G of ram and 4 scsi drives, all of them a litle over 18G.
Unfortunatly, it could barely get past POST when I booted it up. After trying to change a few things in the BIOS, it became evident I wasn’t the first one to try. So, back to factory default.
Marked improvement. Now, it could get past POST. Next step, boot something on it. Various livecds and even the windows 2000 server install cd later, I still couldn’t get it to boot anything. Examining the boot log on linux live CDs revealed that it was crashing trying to load USB. However, even disabling usb in the bios or telling the kernel to forget about USB, it still crashed on something else.
Getting a bit desperate, I unplugged everything and started fresh. One by one, I replugged everything until, when I tried to plug one of the SCSI hard drives, it went right back to refusing to boot. An ear check on the drive revealed it made some very weird clicking sounds, so I went back to the shop and asked for a replacement.
Came back home and, that afternoon, I had a minimal gentoo linux install running on it. Next step, get my IDE drives in the system. I had about 500G in IDE drives I used for storage in boo, so I figured I would reuse them. Unfortunatly, it turned out the BIOS’s hard limit for IDE drives stopped at 138G. As many of the drives I wanted to use were bigger then that limit, that was a no-go.
Not only that, but I didn’t have enough power from the PSU to power the IDE drives. To top it off, using my promise PCI IDE controler card turned out to cause issues with the SCSI controler.
So, after considering my options, I decided I needed a SAN. I took one of the single CPU machines I had used for previous tests and got 5 IDE hard-drives connected in it. I then installed a minimal gentoo and got it working as an iSCSI SAN, sharing the disks across the network.
Once this was completed, I was able to configure vmware and make the virtual machines I needed.
At this point, I had a very functional infractructure, with sonofboo acting as a router, a NAS, a database server and a web server, using virtual machines for the router and web server.
Ever since I discovered computers, I have been fascinated with making them work together. My home network is, compared to most, rather complex. It does offer a lot of very interesting capabilities, however.
My old architecture remained stable for several years. It was built using a dual CPU pentium 2 with 512M of ram, several IDE disks of various size and a 100MB network switch.
Inside boo (my home server), I housed 2 virtual machines that served as a router and a web server for the entire network. boo itself was used as a database server, a file server and a few other various functions that changed over time.
When it finally died of motherboard cancer, boo had a uptime of 450 days. It’s last 10 reboots had all been planned and it had never once crashed. Unfortunately, no matter how solid the system, it can’t survive when the only hardware it runs on dies.
And so, with my health slowly returning after a long sick leave, I decided it was time I rebuilt myself a new system.
Good day. Welcome to the madchaz.com blog.
Yes, I’m using wordpress. I’m lazy and I wanted to try it out. First impression is that it looks nice, but man is it heavy. My server groans every time I do something in it.
