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

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 22:03 -0400, Chris Knadle wrote:
> 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.

Learning everything from serial I/O to frame buffer on non-x86 really
teaches you how to deal with a lot.

Heck, just having exposure to legacy BOOTP/TFTP made me an instant
expert in only more recent, automated Enterprise Linux and Windows
deployments.  I still have trouble explaining that to potential clients
who want Windows knowledge as well, although at least a good number of
Linux folk are also long-time UNIX wennies.

> I'd be interested to hear your toughts/opinions on this, but this is 
> probably for another thread.  ;-)

Yeah.  I won't go there.  But the says of the commodity, mass produced
superscalar microprocessor of varying speeds and features are starting
to dwindle.  It's just not worth the R&D cost over limited release time.
IBM was right, and was smart to get out of it.

Design once, sell for 3 years.
Refit once, sell for another 3 years.
Same speed, same features, same design.
Six years, tens (if not hundreds) of millions of units.
All the same from a layout, integration and support standpoint.

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

I really don't know how they botched is so bad.  Don't know if the
committee left out things, cheap fabs really didn't read the specs,
etc...  eSATA is really a hit'n miss.

That's why I keep hammering Seagate for a "certified" eSATA cable for
their Free Agent Pro line.  They don't include one.  And they can't
recommend one that is "certified."

I mean, SAS is not that much different.  Yet SAS works.  I guess when
companies spend a lot more, and it's not-so-commodity, people care about
getting everything exact.

> 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.

Actually, you may _not_ want to do that with 3.5" disc.  You usually
want to spin it up only _once_ per day, and then spin it down at the end
of the day.  And you really don't want to use it more than 8 hours, 14
at the most.  But don't spin it down every 15 minutes, at least not with
commodity 3.5" disc.

> 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.

I know I posted some stuff on that matter while back -- on-line +
near-line + off-line, and how they are complementary to each.




-- 
Bryan J  Smith              Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
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           Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution