Introducion for me and my system
Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2012 11:47 am
I thought it would be interesting to introduce myself and my system. If this is not the right place to do that or if no one cares, feel free to delete or ignore this.
This was brought on by Bigfoot65 saying that something I had done was needlessly complicated, and since I have often been accused of that, I thought about posting this. (Bigfoot65 has been very helpful and friendly and this is not intended as any kind of zing at him.)
I am a systems programmer for a living and I have been for about 35 years. (Yes I AM an OLD FART.) I am a past member of the 802.1 committee and currently do communications research at the University of Texas. So, my brain works differently than most people's and I have an odd sense of what is complicated and what is not.
So, I have this network at home, its got a router, an additional access point, a mail server (you can write me at genel@armadillo.nu) a little NAS and a Windows computer with a 4TB RAID system on it. Mostly I use the computers at home for toys, though I do run a CAD program to design furniture. The most important thing on the network are the family photos (since 1998 we have not used film). I keep a copy of them on the RAID and back them up to the NAS and periodically to Blue Ray, which I keep in a safe.
The servers live in a little room (called the wiring closet) along with my 5kva UPS. The wiring closet has it's own air conditioner that runs all summer and I can go weeks without going in there.
So, I was pretty happy with my little network and I'm pretty busy (in addition to my job, I am building a house doing all the work myself), so I just let it run along. Then one day a couple of weeks ago the RAID controller burns up, the fan quit and the drive overheated (while I was watching a movie on my Nexus which just kinda locked up). My take away lesson from this is don't trust your stuff to proprietary RAID controllers.
Now the NAS, which is a My Book World Edition is getting long in the tooth (about 5 years old), the mail server runs on a Windows Vista machine that can't be upgraded and is about 7 years old. So I decided that it was about time to replace quite a bit of the stuff. Also I have become interested in running a DLNA server for our music collection which lives on the NAS.
Did I mention that I was cheap? Yeah, my wallet squeaks when I open it.
So I bought some parts at Frys and put a new system together. I harvested the drives from the RAID (both of which had good copies of the data on them, hooray for RAID 0). The only thing I spent more than the minimum for was the mother board and the case, which is large, has has room for 6 hard drives 4 CD drives and places for 10 fans (its going to be in the wiring closet I don't care how much noise it makes). I got a mother board with 6 SATA connectors and several expansion slots and room for 4 memory sticks. Everything else is bottom feeder stuff, it can be upgraded later if needed. Still I spent about $500 on the system.
I decided to go with Ubuntu server edition, because it is cheap and does not have artificial limits on the number of users. Because I like to play with things, I decided to put everything up on virtual machines and only run the VM host on the native platform. I choose Virtual box, not JUST because its free, but because I knew how to set it up and use it.
The system is headless and will look like this when its all done. (The second 2TB drive is still being used in the live until I can get the files off of it.)
Now the first thing I want to put up is a file server. I looked at straight Samba on Ubuntu and seriously at FreeNAS. But after reading about Amahi, I decided to give it a try. So here is what the virtual machine I put it in looks like:
The idea is that this will provide file services to the whole house and to all of the other virtual machines. The boot disk is a *.VDI format virtual disk, the LZ and 200GB storage are mapped with VMDK files that map LVM slices on the root disks. The 2TB disks are mapped VMDK files to the entire physical disk. In theory I can take them out, put them on a plain Linux system and read them. (Hmmm, need to try that.)
So that is my first system, last night I cleared out the earlier VMs and built the HDA sysem and installed the OS and Amahi. I am currently having an issue with greyhole, but I am sure we will get that sorted out.
My biggest problem is lack of time. I have spent all of my time at home for a week on this and I am now behind schedule on the cabinets I am building for the kitchen. My wife will tolerate me spending some cash on the project, but she wants her kitchen done soon. So I need the file server up and running, VERY SOON.
This was brought on by Bigfoot65 saying that something I had done was needlessly complicated, and since I have often been accused of that, I thought about posting this. (Bigfoot65 has been very helpful and friendly and this is not intended as any kind of zing at him.)
I am a systems programmer for a living and I have been for about 35 years. (Yes I AM an OLD FART.) I am a past member of the 802.1 committee and currently do communications research at the University of Texas. So, my brain works differently than most people's and I have an odd sense of what is complicated and what is not.
So, I have this network at home, its got a router, an additional access point, a mail server (you can write me at genel@armadillo.nu) a little NAS and a Windows computer with a 4TB RAID system on it. Mostly I use the computers at home for toys, though I do run a CAD program to design furniture. The most important thing on the network are the family photos (since 1998 we have not used film). I keep a copy of them on the RAID and back them up to the NAS and periodically to Blue Ray, which I keep in a safe.
The servers live in a little room (called the wiring closet) along with my 5kva UPS. The wiring closet has it's own air conditioner that runs all summer and I can go weeks without going in there.
So, I was pretty happy with my little network and I'm pretty busy (in addition to my job, I am building a house doing all the work myself), so I just let it run along. Then one day a couple of weeks ago the RAID controller burns up, the fan quit and the drive overheated (while I was watching a movie on my Nexus which just kinda locked up). My take away lesson from this is don't trust your stuff to proprietary RAID controllers.
Now the NAS, which is a My Book World Edition is getting long in the tooth (about 5 years old), the mail server runs on a Windows Vista machine that can't be upgraded and is about 7 years old. So I decided that it was about time to replace quite a bit of the stuff. Also I have become interested in running a DLNA server for our music collection which lives on the NAS.
Did I mention that I was cheap? Yeah, my wallet squeaks when I open it.
So I bought some parts at Frys and put a new system together. I harvested the drives from the RAID (both of which had good copies of the data on them, hooray for RAID 0). The only thing I spent more than the minimum for was the mother board and the case, which is large, has has room for 6 hard drives 4 CD drives and places for 10 fans (its going to be in the wiring closet I don't care how much noise it makes). I got a mother board with 6 SATA connectors and several expansion slots and room for 4 memory sticks. Everything else is bottom feeder stuff, it can be upgraded later if needed. Still I spent about $500 on the system.
I decided to go with Ubuntu server edition, because it is cheap and does not have artificial limits on the number of users. Because I like to play with things, I decided to put everything up on virtual machines and only run the VM host on the native platform. I choose Virtual box, not JUST because its free, but because I knew how to set it up and use it.
The system is headless and will look like this when its all done. (The second 2TB drive is still being used in the live until I can get the files off of it.)
Code: Select all
+---------------+
| Actual System |
+---------------+
| +-----------+ + ---------------------+
+-----------| Boot Disk |----+---| Ubuntu boot partition|
| 500 GB | | + ---------------------+
+-----------+ |
| |
| | +----------------------+
| +---| Ubuntu swap partition|
| | +----------------------+
| |
| | +----------------------+
| +---| Greyhole LZ for VM |
| | | 100 GB |
| | +----------------------+
| |
| | +----------------------+
| +---| Greyhole Storage |
| | for VM 200GB |
| +----------------------+
|
+-----------+ +-------------------------+
| 2TB Disk1 +--------| single partition for VM +
+-----------+ +-------------------------+
|
|
+-----------+ +-------------------------+
| 2TB Disk2 +--------| single partition for VM +
+-----------+ +-------------------------+
Now the first thing I want to put up is a file server. I looked at straight Samba on Ubuntu and seriously at FreeNAS. But after reading about Amahi, I decided to give it a try. So here is what the virtual machine I put it in looks like:
Code: Select all
+----------------+
| Virtual System |
| HDA |
+----------------+
|
| +-----------+ + ---------------------+
+-----------| Boot Disk |--------| Ubuntu boot partition|
| 100 GB | + ---------------------+
+-----------+
|
|
+-------------+ +------------------+
| Greyhole LZ +------| single partition +
+-------------+ +------------------+
|
|
+---------------+ +------------------+
| Greyhole +----| single partition |
| storage 200GB | | |
+---------------+ +------------------+
|
|
+-----------+ +------------------+
| 2TB Disk1 +--------| single partition +
+-----------+ +------------------+
|
|
+-----------+ +------------------+
| 2TB Disk2 +--------| single partition +
+-----------+ +------------------+
So that is my first system, last night I cleared out the earlier VMs and built the HDA sysem and installed the OS and Amahi. I am currently having an issue with greyhole, but I am sure we will get that sorted out.
My biggest problem is lack of time. I have spent all of my time at home for a week on this and I am now behind schedule on the cabinets I am building for the kitchen. My wife will tolerate me spending some cash on the project, but she wants her kitchen done soon. So I need the file server up and running, VERY SOON.