Hardware
Spring Cleaning Time for my Setup
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.
2009’s Virtualization Techniques Compared
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.
My New Router
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.
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€.
Combine the D945GCLF2 with a case, a PSU, some RAM, a CF-Card and an additional NIC and you’ve got a nice and small router. Read more…
6 months with a Dell XPS M1530
After 6 months of excessively using my XPS M1530 I’d just like to share a few thoughts.
I transported it in my bag without any shielding, I used it in trains, I used it in buses, I even forgot it outside when it started to rain (very light rain of course)… nothing. No scratches. No Damages.
Cons first:
- The display could be easier to open
- The display mounting doesn’t always close well
- The fan is very noisy with latest BIOS versions (thanks to the faulty nVidia GPU chipsets)
- The optical drive is pretty noisy, too
- NO GBIT LAN!!! (I really miss this feature two or three times a month…)
- The touchpad sometimes just hangs (until I press the right button)
- The battery runtime is “only” about 120min with the 6-Cell pack
And the Pros:
- All in all build quality is pretty good
- It runs very stable (Not a single crash. Not even in summer)
- I love my LED display with its 1920×1200 pixels
- The integrated bluetooth is nice
- Altough the integrated webcam has a very small sensor it’s quality is pretty decent
- The integrated cardreader is very useful but I need CompactFlash!!!
- HDMI out is very useful to me
I contacted Dell’s very(!) good (german) support because of the noisy fan and Read more…
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Hi, my name is Chris. I am a wannabe photog, traveler & geek that lives in Hesse, Germany. more about me...
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