Michael Conigliaro

I am all too familiar with the Capacitor Plague of the early 2000’s, having had three motherboards and a DSL modem/router fail because of it. Well, I can add my VIA EPIA CL to that list now too.

You know, I’ve had this same idea for a few years now, and now that I know what it looks like, I’m thinking about doing it again. Over the last couple years, I’ve gotten rid of most of my extra computer junk and downsized to a laptop, but when I look at my current “rack,” there are a few essentials that won’t go away for the foreseeable future:

• Home server
• Uninterruptible power supply
• KVM switch
• Firewall
• Wireless access point
• DSL modem

I’ve also been thinking that the money I spent on this laptop might have been better invested in a new chair. I thought it would be nice to sit on my couch with a laptop, but my legs just get hot and sweaty. Laptop keyboards and touchpads suck when trying to get any actual work done, and when I come home, I miss the dual monitor setup I have at work. So if I do decide to invest in a new desktop machine, I think I’d have enough computer junk to justify a little 12U server enclosure, and I’m sure it would look a lot better than the shelf I have now.

Since I don’t have a wiki set up here, I guess I’ll use this page to keep track of my potential shopping list:

• 1 Kendall Howard 12U Compact Series SOHO Server Rack ~$400
• 2 iStarUSA D-400 ~$300
• 2 iStarUSA TC-Rail-24 ~$50
• 1 GA-EP45-UD3P ~$100
• 1 Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 ~$160
• 1 G.Skill 4GB DDR2-800 Kit ~$40
• 1 Video Card?
• 2 X223Wbd LCD Monitors ~350

OK, I’ll write more later.

Hopefully you’ve noticed some drastic improvements in load times, as I’ve moved the website to new hardware. My old “server” was a little Mini-ITX box with a 1Ghz VIA Nehemiah CPU, 256MB of memory, and a laptop hard drive. It certainly was quiet and power efficient, but it was frustratingly slow sometimes. The new server is actually my old desktop with an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, 512MB of memory, and two brand new 750GB WD Caviars running in a RAID 1 array (yes, these drives are dead silent like the reviews say). I decided to go with Linux software raid after reading some interesting opinions on Linux Software RAID vs Hardware RAID. I also found some surprising benchmarks showing that Linux software RAID is actually faster than a lot of consumer-level SATA RAID cards.

Compared to the old hardware…

root@old-server:~# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda
 
/dev/hda:
 Timing cached reads:   278 MB in  2.01 seconds = 138.26 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   88 MB in  3.00 seconds =  29.32 MB/sec

the new hardware shows huge improvements in disk transfer rates, pretty much in line with what I expected.

root@new-server:~# hdparm -tT /dev/md0
 
/dev/md0:
 Timing cached reads:   950 MB in  2.00 seconds = 474.49 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  222 MB in  3.01 seconds =  73.81 MB/sec

With twice as much memory as before, I’m also not swapping nearly as much (or really at all for that matter). But what I didn’t expect was for Linux software RAID and LVM2 to have such a big impact on my load average. It actually seems to be around 10-20% higher on average, even with a much faster CPU. Interesting…

My hard drive died. I’ll be right back…

Ok, I’m back. At least two good things came out of this. I replaced my old Courier IMAP server with Dovecot, and then I replaced SquirrelMail with RoundCube (which i just discovered today). Radical dude.

I think I might be in the market for some network/direct attached storage soon, so I’m going to start listing interesting NAS/DAS devices I’ve come across so that I can make a decision some other time when I feel like spending (a lot of) money. I need a new UPS battery first anyway. Anyone have any experience with any of these devices?

• Promise NS4300N
• Infrant ReadyNAS NV+
• Buffalo TeraStation

I should also spend some time at NAS Central.