[nylug-talk] Slim home server for samba and subversion ( and possibly IMAP)

[Chris Knadle]

On Sunday 11 May 2008, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 15:46 -0400, Chris Knadle wrote:
> If you want to go even lower power, then non-x86 is the way.

   Agreed.  I wouldn't try to design-in an AMD Geode into a cellphone.  :-P

> Again, even Apple signaled it was not going completely Atom when they
> snatched up a major IBM Power 5 licensee with a PowerPC 970 (Power 5-based
> PowerPC) compatible solution.  Most people, myself included, assumed
> Apple was done with even looking at PowerPC when IBM never delivered on
> the promised, 1.2GHz, low-power PPC970 for a G5 notebook.

   Yep, I thought Apple was done with PowerPC too.

> > Fun little boxes.  Loading Debian wasn't terribly hard because I found
> > instructions; because there's no VGA  they require understanding how to
> > redirect all of the normal console I/O to the serial port (grub, kernel
> > bootup messages, getty login).
>
> Because of these, among other things, Intel figured most wanted an x86
> compatible embedded, commonly one with commodity PCI ASICs on-die as
> standard, to address such for only a "few extra pennies" and a "few
> extra watts."  Time will tell if they made the right move.

   To begin with I preferred boards with VGA because I was less confident, and 
I didn't want to run into the situation where things were working but I 
couldn't see anything happen.  That concern actually materialized when I was 
first loading one of these Alix2c3's because I had chosen a serial cable that 
turned out to have been wired in a crazy manner (it had come with a 3kV 
TrippLite UPS), so I got zero communication from the box for the first week.  
The only feedback the box gives by default is a power light; the other lights 
require an external kernel module to do anything, so there was not even any 
disk activity feedback.  Once I found a properly wired serial cable I was 
able to see that everything was working exactly as expected.  I had it 
working and didn't know it.  ;-)  Ugh.

> 2007 was the year set-top finally outsold PC, and had it not been for
> Microsoft and others "crippling" some of the features of the former, the
> PC's limits would have been far greater.  Most people don't need, and
> don't really want, a PC -- but that's another story.

    I'd be interested to hear your toughts/opinions on this, but this is 
probably for another thread.  ;-)
 
> > Hey, now that's cool.  I thought it was a special SATA connector for
> > laptop SATA drives.  Nice that that's not the case.
>
> No, internal SATA (also SAS) has a single edge connector with very
> strict and rigid, mechanical standards.  It has been extremely well
> proliferated and followed (with few exceptions).  SAS cabling is also
> well spec'd and followed, but SAS is hardly commodity (and enterprises
> take things more seriously).
>
> Unfortunately, eSATA has not, not at all, and there are a lot of "cheap
> vendors" that tend to dominate for consumers.  Just research Tivo Series
> 3 and eSATA cables and people will talk about different mechanical
> specifications and their variations in implementation.  ;)

   Okay so eSATA is something to watch out for and examine more closely.

> > Probably the wrong decision knowing what you've told me.  ;-)
> > Oh well.
>
> I'm a firm believer in "managed" 3.5" drives that never leave a system
> and are well-managed for spin (average 5,000-10,000 restarts over 5
> years, with only 6-10 hours/day usage, maximum), thermals, etc...  They
> currently dominate massive arrays of commodity disks.

   Yeah, I happen to like setting auto spin-down after 15 mins 
using 'hdaparm -S 180 <device>' at bootup for drives that are only used 
occasionally.  I honestly don't know if it helps drive longevity or not.

> But for SOHO usage, I started liberally deploying 2.5" drives as
> short-term (3 years or less), near-line/off-line storage -- in addition
> to DVD-R/RAM (which I've been utilizing since 1998) and other options.
> Although when someone is hitting 1TB in an off-line backup need on a
> weekly basis, and needs 10 year retainment, LTO is really the option
> I've gone to for a good 6-7 years now.

   Yeah it depends.  I have < 500 GB to back up personally, so it's not bad.  
Tape backup drive speed was previously discussed on the list three months ago 
(concerning encrypted tape storage) and LTO4 seemed to be the favorite.  
Right now I'm looking to implement 'BackupPC' which is FOSS and looks pretty 
flexible; does rsync over ssh also.  Bonus that it's in the Debian tree.  :-)  
It's mostly meant for backup to hard disk rather than tape.

   -- Chris

-- 

Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle at coredump.us