Computer

Spring Cleaning Time for my Setup

March 8, 2010 in Computer, Daily Life, Hardware, I'm Bitching

Last month really was a bad month for my IT. In just two weeks, my gateways CF card died, my server’s PSU and HDD died and my main switch now has 4 of it’s 8 ports failing so I finally had to send it in for service. I had no Internet, I had no eMail, no Intranet and no VPN, but at least I had backups of my personal stuff!

The one good thing about all that is that I now had time to re-organize everything. A few years ago I was very paranoid and decided to put everything I need on my LAN. Storage, eMail servers, Bookmark synchronization, Calendars, Contacts and so on. To get that but still keep my LAN secure I used SSH tunnels, reverse proxies, virtual machines, subnet and vlan separation… My LAN consists of many single points of failure: A single Internet uplink, a single gateway, a single switch and a single server. Internet uplinks can go down, gateways can fail, switches can fail, servers can fail… all this leads to SSH tunnels going down which leads to services being unreachable even when the rest is back up.

Today I’m no longer that paranoid. I learned a lot and now decided to outsource the important stuff. I needed a solution suitable for a poor man which means I can’t afford redundant dedicated servers or even co-locations.

I already got to work with Google Apps and so I decided to mix it with shared-hostings and someself-hosting.

I’m mostly back up. My gateway is re-installed, serving me Internet access, firewalling, VPN and a reverse-proxy.

Sometime next week I’ll restore my Server to serve Files and the Intranet website, Databases and an internal Mail-relay, do backups and some other things using KVM instead of Xen (more on that to come!).

What do I want to tell you with all that? Be prepared. Have backups. Keep it simple.

Stay tuned. Some new tutorials and ideas about VPNs, certificates and my new little love nginx will follow.

How-To: Use Google Apps as a MobileMe or Exchange alternative

November 3, 2009 in Computer, How-To, Network, Software

I already wrote about Google Apps as a mail-hoster for your own domains. Today I’m going to talk about Google Apps for almost everything else you might need for your office or personal organization. I just set up Google Calendar and Google Address book synchronization on my Google Apps account.

Your Gmail account also has the Calendar, Contacts, Sites and Docs features, but you can’t collaborate with other employees or members that good. On the other hand you have many other features like Reader or Picasaweb within one account.

I used to use Funambol for contact synchronization, but with my iPhone or my Mac or anything else but Thunderbird synchronization was very beta like and crashed my Contact database several times. Plus they went commercial a few weeks ago. My self-hosted Calendar also didn’t sync very well with my computers and mobile devices which is why I was looking for a more reliable solution.

And although I don’t really like the Idea of storing personal information like Contacts and Calendars at the servers of a company like Google, the way better synchronization compared to my previous and the other (free) solutions I tried, made me switch to Google Apps for these two tasks. And I really like it!

Google Apps provides Microsoft Exchange and CalDAV functionality, so you can sync your contacts and calendars to almost every client and device you want. Read more…

2009’s Virtualization Techniques Compared

June 4, 2009 in Computer, Hardware, Network, Security, Software, Unix

Hi folks, before we get started a small explanation of my setup and why I want to replace it.
My small home server runs Xen 3.3 with Ubuntu Intrepid, a Debian Xen kernel and the guests on LVM devices. Guest OSs vary from Debian over Solaris to Windows. I built the server last year, but sadly I’m already running out of HDD space and want to upgrade soon. I also want to re-install the Dom0 because Intrepid doesn’t run very well: USB doesn’t work with all devices, there are some bugs in the start-up scripts and I have trouble with the ttys.
A lot has changed since I last fiddled with virtualization so I used this weeks bad weather to compare the current status of all those virtualization systems.
Because there are so many different needs, there are many specialized solutions for desktop and server virtualization. Open-Source, free or commercial ones.

I use VirtualBox on my workstation because it’s free, fast, easy to use and runs very very well. I’ve used the VMware products earlier on Linux and Windows until they became too feature-rich, slow and sometimes even buggy for me. But this post is not about desktop virtualization, it’s about open-source (or free) server virtualization.

VMware Server, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, VirtualBox, Xen and KVM are the ones I’ve tried. There is also Virtuozzo, OpenVZ, UML and so on, but these are more like chroots on steroids. Continue reading to see what I liked and what I didn’t like about them.

help.ubuntu.com links to my blog

June 1, 2009 in Computer, I'm Bitching, Unix

I was just comparing the current status of KVM, Xen and some other virtualization techniques when I came across the Ubuntu Help for Xen. The page states that Ubuntu still doesn’t provide a Xen Dom0 Kernel in their latest release, but that doesn’t surprise me becaus Xen still didn’t make it into the official Kernel… maybe because everyone loves KVM that much. But they link you to a blog post which shows how to run Xen on Ubuntu anyhow.

Noticed it? Yes that’s my article. I was really surprised to see a link to my actually pretty provocative article on an Ubuntu site. They could have also linked to bderzhavets article.

So… that’s it for now. I’ll continue comparing virtualization techniques with the help of debian-user-german and will hopefully begin with the reinstallation of my xen host.

How-To: Use Google Apps for your Domain

May 21, 2009 in Computer, How-To, Network

I had this post drafted for some time now and just used some free time to review it…

Do you have your own domain and some webspace, but no mail services for that domain? Or do you have a DynDNS account for your home server and want some fast webspace and mail services?

You can get all that with Google Apps for Business – Standard Edition.
And the good news is: It’s free.

Many of you know GMail, but very few people I know, knew about Google Apps for Business. The difference between GMail and Google Apps for Business is, that you use your own domain instead of gmail.com and you get a collaboration suite for all your users and some shared storage. You can have up to 50 user accounts, each with currently 7.5Gb of storage. You can also have some webspace for a small website… All you have to do is signing-up at Google, authenticating your domain and adding MX-Records to your domain.
You can even add “alias domains”.

Google has so many docs, examples, videos and tutorials that it doesn’t need a pro for setup. You just need some basic knowledge of DNS and Mail.
That’s why I’m not going into details of the setup this time. It just depends too much on your current setup, your hoster and stuff.

But here are the important links:

Overview of Google Apps

Google Apps for Business – Standard Edition

Example Guide

By the way: I switched from an own mail server to a very custom setup of my own imap serverand Google Apps for Business for my domains. It works perfect. Even Spam is very well controlled.

Upgrading my 2009 Mac mini

March 20, 2009 in Computer, Mac

I just upgraded my new Mac mini with 4Gb of RAM and a 320Gb HDD. I ordered Kingston DDR3-1066 4Gb Kit tested for Apple (see Kingston Memory Configurator) and a Seagate Momentus 2007.3 2.5″ 7200rpm 320Gb from Computeruniverse.

Okay… ordering was the easy part, but installing was quite difficult! I don’t mean the upgrade itself, but opening the case without scratching it! These two videos helped me a lot: Read more…

My new Mac mini

March 19, 2009 in Computer, Mac

Just 10 days after Apple announced the new Mac mini I recieved mine last Friday Would you believe me if I’d tell you that I was happy as a child on christmas evening when I unpacked it?

I bought the “small” version with a 2.0Ghz Core2Duo, a 120Gb 5400rpm HDD and 1Gb of RAM because I am going to upgrade HDD and RAM myself.

All in all I really like the new mac mini. It plays 1080p Blurays just fine. It’s boot up time is also great (even with the 5400rpm HDD and 1Gb RAM!) and the noise… what noise? My Dell XPS M1530 is way noisier than this mini (WAAAAAAAAAAY noisier!) The fan almost never kicks in and even when it does… it’s noise is pretty pleasant. Sadly there are still some annoying bugs, but Apple is working on Mac OS X 10.5.7 and Mac OS Snow Leopard. Hope they will fix everything that annoys me :p There is not much more to say about the new Mac mini, no impressive innovations, still the same design… Have a look at my unboxing pics if you want. I’ll post an update of the upgrading process when I received the new HDD and RAM.

Isn’t the box cute?

What’s in the box:

The mini’s new home:

Performance issues of this Blog & what's wrong with OVH's RPS

March 16, 2009 in Computer, Daily Life, I'm Bitching

Hi guys & ladies I know it’s been quite silent in here during the last few weeks, but I was quite busy and everytime I had some spare time to blog my damn web-server caused some problems…

O.K. I have to admit I’m a student that doesn’t have much money, so I went with a cheap pseudo-virtualized machine called RPS from OVH, which has only a small Intel Celeron CPU with 512MB DDR2 RAM. But that’s actually fine for a low-frequented website like this… if there wouldn’t be one major issues with these RPS’: The hard-disk is an iSCSI share connected through a simple FastE port, which wouldn’t be much of a problem if OVH didn’t oversubscribe their iSCSI hosts (at least it looks like they do). Sometimes the iSCSI drive is as fast as ~250kByte/s what makes it impossible to do anything. Of course I contacted their support and after about 4 days of total downtime (couldn’t even login through SSH) they rebooted the iSCSI host, what – so they believe – solved the problem… You might have noticed that it did not.

So… I asked around a bit and got an impressive amount of feedback of users who have exactly the same problem as I have. Sucks…
Long story short: I’m gonna quit the contract for this “server” (doesn’t really serve, does it?) and search for a cheap (yeah I mean inexpensive) alternative.

Please stay tuned in the meantime and subscribe to my RSS-Feed if you want (just wanted to mention this because hits per day have decreased to less than 50% since the server got that unreliable ). Take care.

By the way: I’ve received the new Mac mini on Friday

Linux hates me!

February 25, 2009 in Daily Life, I'm Bitching, Unix

I started using Linux back in 2004 with SuSE Linux 9.0 and I liked it. When I upgraded to 9.1 (or 10.0? don’t know…) I got a bit disappointed, which is why I switched the distro. I installed Debian Stable (Sarge at that time), but I found the KDE version coming with Debian Sarge to be pretty old (or older than the SuSE 9.0 ones…I have versionitis you know), which is why I upgraded to SID. I knew that SID isn’t meant to run on production systems, but I got tired of the dependency problems ‘n stuff pretty soon… I then installed Gentoo on my Desktop and kept Debian Stable on my server which worked very well for more than two years. I mean… first time installation of Gentoo was a pain in the ass on my AMD Athlon XP 1800+ and upgrades (especially KDE upgrades) were annoying, but the system ran well and the rolling-updates were cool. I also learned a lot about the Linux internals like the kernel itself, using command line and editing config files… all the basic stuff which helped me quite a lot with OpenBSD and MacOS later on.

Everything worked well until I got p*ssed off by the compiling times. So I upgraded the hardware to a Quad-Core CPU and 8Gb RAM and installed Gentoo AMD64. Maybe that was a mistake: Flash didn’t work without hacks, Java browser plugin didn’t work, KDE applications crashed more often than on the old installation, GUI applications felt sluggish and the compiling times were not as good as I expected them to be (never figured out why).

Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear me bitching! Read more…

My New Router

January 31, 2009 in Computer, Hardware

After my almost 10 years old P3/500 Compaq Deskpro EN made some ugly noises a few weeks ago I felt like I should replace it Especially because it’s my gateway to the Internet.

The old one

This old boy is big, noisy and probably wasted a lot of energy, but it ran more than just well as a dsl router, a vpn gateway, a packet filter, a proxy, a dns server, a ntp server and possibly other things for the last three years and for almost one year without even a reboot using OpenBSD 4.2.

Nevertheless it was time for something new. I wanted something smaller, something more quiet and something with less power comsumption. I came accross these new Intel Atom CPU’s. But after a lot of research I have not found a suiteable (small, low-power, fanless, inexpensive) Implementation of this CPU.

So I bought this one: Intel D945GCLF2. It has an Intel Atom 330 CPU with a TDP of 8W and an Intel 945GC chipset with a TDP of 22W . If you look at the pictures you can see a fan. This fan doesn’t cool the CPU, it cools the Northbridge! But hey! it’s available for less than 70€… a totally fanless board like the MSI IM-945GSE-A costs almost 200€.