sitzmar!

The first concept I had for my file server revolved around the Asus Eee Box. It met the low power requirements, was very quiet, and it’s diminutive dimensions would make it perfect to tuck away. However using this box would mean that I’d be stuck with external USB drives for storage. While this would not be terrible, there would be an added cost for a disk enclosure, and performance would take a hit as well.

Then I found out that Intel sells an Atom based motherboard, complete with SATA II ports and a PCI slot. After a little further reading about the product, I decided to go with it and picked out components to round out the system.

Here’s what I got:

• Intel BOXD945GCLF Atom processor Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
• Intel PWLA8391GT 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter
• G.SKILL 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Desktop Memory
• SYBA SY-IDE2MC-4B IDE to CF/MMC/MS/SD Adapter
• COOLER MASTER Centurion 541 RC-541-SKN1 MicroATX Mini Tower
• Antec earthwatts EA380 380W ATX12V v2.0 Power Supply
• 2 Transcend 2GB Secure Digital (SD) Flash Card Model TS2GSD133

Total $268.84

I’ve already come in at least $30 cheaper than what the rumored Eee Box price would be, and I’ve got something much more flexible.

In reading about this Intel motherboard, I learned that there are some compatibility issues with linux/bsd and the integraed broadcom ethernet controller. I opted to get the Intel gigabit pci card to ensure compatibility, but also because the onboard only supports 10/100mbit.

The SYBA card adapter will take both CompactFlash or SD and fully supports DMA for speedy data transfers. I also picked up two 2GB SD cards for my trip to Italy. When I get back one of them will become the primary drive for the file server. No noise, and very low power consumption. I’m not too sure how great the SD card will work, but I don’t expect any major problems.

I feel that the power supply is a bit overkill right now. But when looking for power supplies that were compatible with the Intel mobo, there are limited options that meet the 80+ efficiancy rating and include an ample number of SATA power connectors. I’ve alwasys liked Antec’s power supplies, and I’m sure that this one will work nicely.

I haven’t purchased the disk drives yet, but I will likely choose the WD Caviar GP 1TB drive. They are damn near silent, and as part of Western Digital’s ‘Green Power’ line they’ve managed to reduce power consumption by a few watts.

My order should be arriving on Monday or Tuesday. Pictures and an update will follow when I’ve got it all together.

I’ve wanted to build a dedicated file server for quite some time now. I had a lot of requirements floating around in my head for what I wanted to achieve, mainly:

• 1TB+ of fault tolerant disk space - I’ve already got 5 disk drives in a variety of sizes holding my precious data. Losing a disk would be a tragedy. So the new storage system needs redundancies in case of a disk failure.
• ZFS - I’m a big fan of what Sun has brought to the table with ZFS. Snapshots are perfect if you’ve ever blown important files away with an accidental slip on the delete key. And the ability to grow a pool makes future expansion a breeze.
• Energy Efficient - My current server is my old desktop. On average it draws 165W of power, all day, every day. Worst part is, 98% of the time it’s not doing a damn thing. For the new server I’d like to be using < 60W. I feel like using less electricity than a standard light bulb is a fairly good goal.
• Easy to Manage - I’ve seen some truly terrible management GUI’s in my time, and I feel that most companies really underestimate how important a solid design is. A good web based interface is my preference, but I also want to be able to muck around at a lower level if needed.

Today I purchased most of the hardware to build a box that would meet all of these goals. I decided to wait until after I return from my trip to Italy to purchase the hard drives. Tomorrow I’ll get into the details of the hardware I picked out and the overall plan for how I’m gonna do this.

This King5 article talks about mercury contamination from the mining operation in the Silverton area years ago. I happened to be up there earlier this year and took pictures of the concentrators. As you can see, it’s amazing that one of them is still standing.

A buddy of mine built a nice Xubuntu image for the eee, and needed some mirrors to help get it out there.

The eeeusers wiki is getting hit pretty hard currently, so here’s a the current list of mirrors:

tivac.com
lildragon.eu
sitzmar.com (here)

I’d love to get my hands on one to play with, but I just don’t think I’d use it enough to justify the cost…

Just finished watching the Seahawks-Rams game, and the name of the Ram’s coach Scott Linehan caught my attention. The name sounded very familiar, so I did a little googling and discovered that the wife of Scott Linehan was my english teacher sophomore year of high school! At the time, her husband was the offensive coordinator for UW. She also talked about her brother-in-law the actor, who had a part in ‘The Thin Red Line’. Maybe you’ve heard of Jim Caviezel? Yeah, I thought so.

It really is a small world.

Click for full size

Okay, I promise. Can I please have a replacement drive now?

I finally googled one of my biggest annoyances in vista: automatic reboots after windows updates.
Turns out it’s a simple change using the group policy editor.

Here’s the details:
http://4sysops.com/archives/disable-restart-after-windows-automatic-updates/

Last night I used netstumbler to scan for wireless access points in my neighborhood. I found about 6 right away, and then another 5 after moving my wifi usb key closer to the window.

The original reason for my scan was to find out which channels were being used in the area. Not surprising 6, 9 and 11 were the popular options. Also, I was surprised to find that most of them had encryption turned on.

I switched my AP to channel 3, and was pleased to get an extra megabyte/s in throughput, putting me right around 2.2MB/s. I’m curious what performance will be like once we get the other computers upgraded from B to G.

I came home from work on Tuesday to find our internet connection was down once again. This has been happening with disappointing frequency since we moved into the new house. It always comes back after a few hours, so I busy myself with other things for the rest of the evening.

Wednesday morning, no internet.

Wednesday evening, still no internet.

This is ridiculous, so I decide to call comcast. Mostly to rant, because my previous conversations with their tech support have been oh so helpful. Comcast dude tells me that there’s currently an outage in my area and that it should be resolved within 24-48 hours of the initial outage. He credits the account for 3 days of service, so I’m placated for the moment.

Jump ahead two days.

I get home from work on Friday, and we still don’t have a working connection. The damn modem continues to taunt me with it’s blinking lights. I call comcast again, and this time I’m told that there currently is no outage in my area and, here’s the kicker, their logs don’t indicate any outages at all this week.

Buh… say what?

After declining his offer to send a technician out to check our lines, I decide to do a little testing of my own. I count no less than 3 splitters between the main feed to our house and the line running inside to the modem. Cripes… who the hell wired this place?? Mounted in the center of the wiring box sits a small grey signal booster. I rig up various configurations, moving cables, removing splitters, trying to find some combination that will bring the internet back into my home. Finally, I simply remove the signal booster from the path, and magically service returned! I reconnect everything back to the original configuration, sans booster, and check again to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.

It was no delusion, just sweet sweet success!

So let this be a lesson kids, cable modems hate signal boosters. And if the technician installing your cable internet tells you that a signal booster “doesn’t really hurt anything”, you call him a liar, kick him in the nuts, and rip the damn thing out.
You will be much, much happier. Trust me.

Looking back through my old posts, it was September when I last had troubles with the primary HD in my bsd box. Well, it started acting up again a few days ago, hardlocking the machine at least once a day, and finally refusing to boot, much like the previous time. So I decided to retire the little guy.

I intended to pickup a cheap drive at a local retailer, but found that even the lower capacity 60 and 80 gig drives cost just as much as a good 250 gig drive does online. Sheesh, what a ripoff!

So I popped over to newegg and picked out a shiny new Hitachi, and then on a whim checked out the canon S3 IS. Whaaa? $40 instant savings?!? Into the cart ya go! I have been meaning to get one of these for a few months now, but that cinched it.

In other news, work is going well. Looking to get my NetApp NACE cert here in the next few weeks. I’ll be getting VMWare training sometime in February and Solaris 10 admin cert in March.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 this weekend, and also found a nifty plugin that pulls my most recent flickr photos and sticks them at the top of my main blog feed. I much prefer this to the flickr badge I had in the sidebar. Once my new camera arrives, I’ll be putting a lot more stuff up, so keep an eye out.