Archive for the ‘hardware’ Category

« Older Entries

FreeNAS iSCSI and VMWare ESXi

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

For a long time I’ve been using NFS to serve the diskspace my FreeNas server has, to my ESXi machine, and ‘ve been wondering if iSCSI would be a better solution. NFS has more overhead than iSCSI, so iSCSI should outperform NFS on higher workloads.
I’ve never really taken the time to get to know iSCSI and it alwasy looked very messy and difficult to set up and use. But today, that idea changed!

We’ve been running ESXi at the office for a couple of weeks too in a test environment, and are investigating the necessities for a production installation at one of our clients. They’ll have 2 servers (1 master, 1 ‘spare’) and a shared NAS/SAN solution to store the virtual disks. As performance is necessary there (I didn’t really care for my own setup at home, as long as it is reliable), I was looking for a simple howto description to use iSCSI on the ESXi side, and tried that with my own FreeNAS storage machine.

Following this guide I found a detailed description of the configuration needed in FreeNAS to get it up and running in 10 minutes. It really did it!
An iSCSI datastore is connected now onto my ESXi machine, for testing. I only took 50GB to test with, as I’m thinking of redesigning my FreeNAS box with another motherboard, raid controller and disk setup, as the current Dual AMD Opteron with 12GB RAM is a bit overkill, and too power hungry… As I don’t have a decent motherboard that supports the Raid controllers I currently use (PCI-X based), I need to rethink the setup and get me a decent PCI-e x4/x8 controller capable of holding 8 to 12 disks (2 controller setup is just fine, even 3 controllers might do if it costs less that way.) When I finish that migration and get all the data copied over, I’ll setup the FreeNAS-ESXi connection on a purely iSCSI based setup…

We’ll see…

Posted in Server Management, System Management, Virtualisation, hardware, linux | No Comments »

Rescanning sata/scsi devices on non-hotswap capable controllers

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

I wanted to use the hotswap tray I recently installed in my computer case, and easily plug in the 1.5TB disk to make a backup of the backup server, before reinstalling it in a couple of days.
When plugging in the disk, the Ubuntu system didn’t see it appearing, or at least, I didn’t notice or know where to look for it.

Looking around (googling) for a ‘sata rescan’ I found a thread describing how to rescan the scsi/sata bus (as sata is seen by the kernel as scsi).
It quite simple, once you know which bus holds which disk…

It works as follows:

Become root:
sudo su
go to the directory for the host/controller in /sys/class/scsi_host/hostN where N is the number of the host

and issue this command:
root@ubuntu:/sys/class/scsi_host/host0# echo - - - > scan

in dmesg you will see the new devices found on this controller/host appearing, and the appropriate /dev/sdX device directives are created automatically.

Easy, no?

Posted in System Management, hardware, linux, ubuntu | No Comments »

TechnoTrend DVB-S2 S2-3200 on MythTV

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Well,

after some testing and trying, it looks like the TechnoTrend S2-3200 is working quite well with MythTV 0.22, though I don’t have or use the DVB-S2 stuff yet… no dual LNB, no HD equipment, just testing for the future.

My Backend was running Ubuntu 9.04 with Mythtv 0.22 packages, which did find the card, but couldn’t use it.
I installed a test machine on an similar motherboard/config and used Ubuntu 9.10, and the card was detected. Switching the TVV smartcard over to the S2-3200 CAM/CI, I was able to scan and later tune in to the TVV encrypted channels!
Bottom line: Ubuntu 9.10, MythTV 0.22 and TT S2-3200 with TVV smartcard: working out of the box!

Update: Sander Van den Bosch has the same setup (kind of, also using the S2-3200 with a TVV subscription). He had an issue receiving the encrypted channels, and he asked for a little information (the reason I installed this testsetup and eventually did the upgrade on my ‘production’ backend). I tried, and he ‘copied’ what was successful for me, but he didn’t succeed in getting the same results.
In the end, he found out that his CAM (original TVV CAM) had an ‘old’ firmware, which wasn’t compatible… It seems my 2 CAM’s (also original TVV CAM modules) are ‘newer’… He used a Windows XP laptop to update the firmware, and succeeded in receiving the TVV encrypted channels! He was able to tune into Eén HD successfully!
Another happy MythTV – TV Vlaanderen user :-D

Posted in MythTV, hardware, linux, ubuntu | 24 Comments »

MythTV 0.22 on Ubuntu 9.04

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

I had a major issue at home with my MythTV backend server… and off course, right before I was implementing a decent backup strategy.

I wanted to move to a Raid5 solution to increase speed and disk capacity, but wanted to do an Ubuntu 9.04 reinstall, move all data and config over from the old single-disk install, and keep running on settings and recordings already in the database. At the same time I wanted to upgrade the backend to Ubuntu 9.10, and use the newer MythTV 0.22 packages.

My install went pretty fine, using software Raid 5 on 3 disks I still had lying around (WD Raid edition SATA2), formatting the 500GB usable space as an ext4 volume, and installation of MythTV and other related packages was done without any issues. I started copying from the old single-disk setup to the new soft-Raid volume, and was almost done migrating. The configuration of MythTV through mythtv-setup couldn’t find my Technotrend S-1500 DVB-S card I used for months now, without any issues on Ubuntu 9.04… so I needed to have a look at that… but I even didn’t get to that point!
All of a sudden, the session over ssh was having some big issues, not finding commands, giving errors etc… Returning to the console, a lot of raid error messages were displayed, so a reboot and recover/rebuild was needed… the machine didn’t take any commands anymore… even a ‘halt’ or ‘reboot’ didn’t work…
When powering down and back up, the machine hung at the kernel loading, giving me a serious error not retrieving md0 anymore… Panic!!!

I disconnected my original disk, booted a Live session of the Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 cd (ext4 is better supported in 9.10 than it is in 9.04), and tried almost everything I know and could find about retrieving data from a faulty software raid volume… to no result…
I decided to do a fresh install on ext3 instead of ext4 with the Ubuntu 9.04 distro, to resolve the card-support issues I was having with Ubuntu 9.10, which worked out pretty fine again.
Card was detected, and scanning gave the results I expected.

I hooked up the original single-disk install SATA drive, and wanted to start copying the database, recording and settings files, but I wasn’t able to mount any of the original partitions on the disk. After some looking around on the disk, I found all partitions vanished! The disk was empty! Even more panic!!!!

Testdisk, an open source partition and data recovering program, had me regain access and information of the recordings partition, and I immediately made a copy of the data to my backup-server, but still no /etc or /var/lib/mysql to be retrieved to get access to the original database and settings… So I need to start from scratch, and convert the old recordings to standard mpg or avi files, so I can at least play them without info etc… That’s not the end of the world!

Now, the MythTV 0.22 upgrade part was going to be the hardest…, or so I thought.
In Ubuntu 9.04, the 0.22 MythTV packages aren’t available through the normal repositories…
I searched in google, and eventually found a page on the MythBuntu site that describes the necessary steps and packages needed to upgrade a 9.04 (or even a 8.10) Ubuntu distro with the MythTV 0.22 release…
The MythTV backend server was easily upgraded through the use of the MythBuntu Repositories package
After installing this deb file through dpkg -i, going into aptitude and doing an update/upgrade, the MythTV packages were upgraded to 0.22 automatically.

I tried connecting with my 0.21 based frontend machines (which run Ubuntu 8.04 LTS), but found that the database structure was changed in such a way the 0.21 cannot contact and use the 0.22 database structure… An upgrade to 0.22 on these machines is needed as well.

I installed the same MythBuntu Repositories package package on these 2 machines, and found it could only install the already installed 0.21 version. I needed to upgrade the distro to 8.10 or higher… I decided to go all the way up to 9.10…

The standard AMD based pc which resides in my living room and is hooked onto the beamer, is the easiest… if anything goes wrong, I can just reinstall it with 9.10 from scratch…, so I started with this one before messing up the MythBuntu 8.04 installation on the AppleTV in the bedroom (which is a lot more work to do a complete (re)installation).
Though not supported, I changed over the /etc/apt/sources.list hardy listings to karmic, and did an apt-get update followed by an apt-get upgrade and an apt-get dist-upgrade… I met a lot of errors installing or configuring packages, and needed to uninstall a lot of packages through aptitude, but eventually using apt-get dselect-upgrade and another apt-get upgrade and dist-upgrade, the machine eventually ended up booting fine with Ubuntu 9.10.
I installed the MythTV 0.22 packages through aptitude and ended up configuring the connection to the newly installed database on the backend. Two minutes , and some screen adjustments later, I was looking at LiveTV through the new 0.22 MythTV release!

For the AppleTV, I will follow the same things, but I’m making a full rsync of the complete filesystem first. If anything goes wrong, I can just rsync it back over it, and have the machine working again…

Now I just need to convert all recordings to a viewable format (mpg or avi) and change all the filenames so I know what recording is in what file… that will take another weekend to do so, I think.

First impressions of 0.22: faster, slicker, … but I didn’t see that many adjustments or changes… (except from the new theme stuff, which was the biggest change announced off course)

Next on the list: BACKUPS!!!! I have a backupserver giving me 2,3TB through NFS of which still 1,2TB is free, why wouldn’t I use it??? :p

More to follow later…
At least now, I’m up to date again…

Posted in AV/TV, MythTV, Server Management, System Management, hardware, linux, ubuntu | 6 Comments »

Astaro Essential Firewall

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Astaro introduces an Essential Firewall Edition of the Astaro Security Gateway software firewall solution, which helps smaller businesses to secure their network, without having to pay lots of money.

As far as the news bulletin describes, the Essential version includes the normal networking stuff, including QoS, DNS Proxy, Statefull Packet Inspection, DHCP Server & Relay, and PPTP/L2TP vpn connectivity.

The software is available as an installation iso image, and a VMWare package.

The last one I will test this evening or tomorrow, so I can give you a detailed overview of the possibilities etc…

More info here.

Posted in IT-news, Security, hardware, linux | No Comments »

Virtual Desktop

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

I have been playing with the idea for a long time now: No more noisy, power-hungry desktop on my desk at home… just a simple, noisless, thin client of some kind.

At one of our clients, we use Igel thinclients that connect to an Ubuntu Desktop -server, over XDMCP.
XDMCP is rather easy to configure and use, and allows full X over networks, so all processing is done on a central machine.
I have a VMWare Server 2.0 and a Citrix XenServer 5.5 machine running for other virtualized testing machines, so why not integrate the ‘Desktop server’ in the virtual setup, to even cut more power costs?

I used an old Wyse 9450XL I bought at the computer fair over half a year ago, formatted the seated 512MB IDE flash drive and ran Damn Small Linux on it, which can work both locally and through an XDMCP session on my Desktop server.

I’ll install FreeNX on the server side too, and compare the speed differences, but as far as I know and remember, DSL does not have the needed recent versions of several libs, so that might be an issue…
Well, we’ll see. For now I’m set.
Desktop ‘computer’ setup only takes about 20W instead of about 200W before with a fullblown PC.
Advantage of the FreeNX way is that remote sessions are also possible… Goodbye to slow VNC connections!

I’ll post some configs, like the gdm.conf on the server side, later.

Posted in System Management, hardware, linux, ubuntu | 2 Comments »

Super Storage – The Backblaze Pod

Friday, September 4th, 2009

Check the blog entry from backblaze. They decided to design their own storage machines which are far less expensive, compared to commercial available material.

This super massive machine looks very appealing to me.
They use a SATA multiplier backplane, which can host 5 SATA drives on a single SATA port.
I’m going to look for the materials, and try to build a 15 drive (strating with cheap 40 or 60GB drives for testing) machine myself…
Combine that with FreeNas and its ability to do iSCSI and NFS, and it would make a perfect VMWare/Citrix storage backend, no?

Posted in IT-news, Virtualisation, hardware, linux | No Comments »

Home Automation – part 2

Monday, May 18th, 2009

The Home Automation project, on which I have been working for about 1.5 years now, is moving forward in an increased pace the last few weeks.
I pulled a lot of cable, both electrical, and Cat5 for data and network, in the past weekends, and the kit is being finished.

As I already mentioned in the starting post at the beginning, the Home Automation project is based on what my boss started out some time ago, and what is used at our offices. He’s still improving the setup, adding a gui layer on top of the system, trying to make it more energy-efficient, expanding its possibilities, …

This morning, the I2C adapter pcb boards arrived, which allow us to add an parallel-to-I2C interface on top of the AR-B1550 boards we use. These boards are in the older NetAsq F50 firewalls we used at our clients a couple of years ago. When replacing the firewalls with the current machines, we asked the customer if we could recuperate their old devices to do some testing with.

The AR-B1550 use an AMD Geode cpu, have 32MB Ram and a mini-IDE (44pin, like found in laptop hard disc connections etc) which holds a Flash disk of 64MB, 2 serial ports, 2 or 3 ethernet ports, a parallel printer port, and what seems to be a PC/104 connecter for expansion. I had a couple of runs to get a debian based OS on the included 64MB flash disk, but we decided to give that up and install an IDE-CF adapter, which currently holds a CF card of 1 or 2 GB.

I will make a detailed cabling diagram explaining how my cabling is done, and post it here later on.

All information on the actual project, pcb boards, and explanation can be found on elektro.ampersant.be. If you need more information, you can contact Jeff for more information or ordering of the pcb’s, beit bare or completed, there.

More information will follow in the next few days and weeks, when I finish my installation at home.

Posted in domotica, hardware, linux | No Comments »

FreeNAS v0.69

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

I decided to give my NAS box another go, reinstalling the machine (after a backup to a 500GB USB disk) with the latest v0.69, as the previously installation didn’t recognise the onboard nvidia gigabit ethernet card.
This one does, and brings a complete new interface and a couple of newly added features.

The backups are running again, and I’m trying out the FreeNAS in NFS and iSCSI mode as a storage backend for a Citrix XenServer 5 installation which I’m testing right now…

The Citrix part I will cover later.

FreeNAS, and I cannot say this enough, is just wonderful!
NFS, FTP, SMB/Cifs and lots more, and now even uPNP and iTunes/DAAP support!
And for free!

Posted in Server Management, Virtualisation, hardware | 2 Comments »

Asus defective – already?

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

Well, it only took about 7 months to break the flash drive on the Asus 900 motherboard…
Not even by doing anything out of the ordinary.
I only used the Asus to first get rid of the installed Windows XP, and then to replace it by a standard options based Ubuntu 8.04, which had been running flawlessly from day 1. The EEE PC has been my daily companion, until I noticed messages like ‘read-only filesystem’ on my / partition, which was located on the onboard 4GB flash module. The extra 8GB Add in module was fine.
Trying to reinstall Ubuntu, as I thought it might have been a filesystem issue of some kind, being reset after a format, I didn’t pass at all… In fact, partitioning went fine the first time, but when I tried to format the / partition, it gave me some errors. Retrying a couple of times, it even became more difficult, until I noticed that I was unable to get a partitioning program (both the installer part that comes in the GUI Ubuntu installer, and the standard fdisk and cfdisk) or even access the ‘disk’…

The Asus EEE PC 900 was returned to a servicing company, after a call with the Dutch Asus Support hotline, and they did an investigation. I’m not going to let you in on the details, because they don’t speak in favor of both the servicing/repair company and Asus themselves, but in the end we decided to drop the EEE PC 900, and let our lawyers, and theirs decide what will happen next… European laws say, as a consumer user you are entitled to a standard Warranty period, spanning the first 2 years, both on labour and parts needed for a repair of the broken machines, unless they can prove the damages are caused by mal-use, or are self-inlflicted… Which both aren’t true in this matter…
The reseller I got the device from had, since they started selling them, an overall failure rating of more than half of these machines (although they haven’t sold many of them, because they normally don’t sell to consumers but only to businesses) which is very odd. In most of the RMA cases, they had a long time taking discussion with either the distributor and Asus, and it took them a very long time to arrange a settlement…

Well, I guess the 900 isn’t coming back, either very soon or ever again…

Posted in hardware, linux, ubuntu | No Comments »

« Older Entries