Hardware

After a few months of running Sabayon Linux on the GodboxV2, i am going back to Windows Server. Back around October of last year, i installed Windows 10 Preview on the GodBoxV2, and, well, there where issues with graphics drivers, etc. Then, some time after, i cant remember off hand when, i moved to Sabayon Linux. Its based on Gentoo but has a lot of the components pre-built. Gentoo is a “Build from scratch” sort of OS. You get a basic kernel and a basic set of components, but you build everything else from scratch… including rebuilding the kernel if you want. Sabayon, on the other hand has all that mostly prebuilt, though you can still use Gentoo’s Portage to build stuff yourself.

So, this part of my article set will be talking specifically about the router and wireless network. At the moment, my router is way overkill:

• Old HP Proliant ML110 G5
• Intel Core2Quad Q6600
• 8 Gb RAM
• total of 12 Gigabit network cards (of which 4 are currently used…)
• 500Gb HDD

I have been playing with some networking in the house and have managed to build some VLANs. The modems are connected both directly to the Router
and to a dedicated switch port for a given VLAN. The plan for the upgrade, which i hope to complete sooner than the rest of the network is as
follows:

So, in my last post i talked about the requirements for the home lab, and in this post, im going to talk about a few more updates i have made in the last few weeks.

First, the processors: in the first post, i talked about Xeon D or Xeon E3… Well, i missed one… The Xeon E5. I have 2 of these in GodBox 2, and you can get them into a microATX board. There does seem to be some limits with the microatx boards, but hopefully enough searching will find me what i am looking for. Ideally, i want it to take “normal” DDR3/4 memory (not SODIMMs like the ASRock one above) and also take enough of them to run 64 or 128Gb of ram (thinking 8 would do the job!). Also, i would like to have 4 GigE ports onboard and 1 management port. 4 onboard is not a hard requirement: If i can get one with 2 ports, i can always get a 4 port card for the PCI-Express slot… Finally, i would like it to have at least 6 SATA ports and possibly an MSATA port. Thinking Boot off MSATA (Windows Server 2016 Nano Server would be used), 2 SSDs and 4 HDDs. Using Storage Spaces, use the 2 SSDs as “Fast” storage for the pool.

So, its that time again… HomeLab upgrade time… Or at least the planning for it. I am in the process of rebuilding my home lab, which involves pull all old servers out of the rack and replacing them with new ones… It also means rewriting the network, possibly upgrading some existing gear and hopefully getting the whole lot done on a budget of some sort…

So, why? Well, biggest reason for all this is currently heat and power usage. We use about 4-6x more electricity than the average house here in Ireland, which means our electricity bill is fairly high. It also means that the lab, which is also my office/bedroom, gets quite warm and uncomfortable during the summer month. There is an Air-Con unit in the room, and, well, that’s costing the most on electricity!

A couple of years back, i did a post about my Daily Carry for college… Well, I have finished (ish) college, but i still cary a lot of weird and wonderful stuff… So, this is the update…

The details are on my Daily Carry page, and, in theory, should always be up to date… Thats the theory anyway… 🙂

Tomorrow, Monday the 28th January, 2013, will be the start of my final real Semester in College. I have been studying part time for the last 3 and a bit years, and tomorrow marks the begining of the end… Its the final REAL semester, meaning at the end of this i will have exams, but i wont be “finished” as such… I have a final semester from September to December where i hand up my final year project, which i plan on documenting here soon.

I have been using an iPhone 4 as a wifi hotspot for a while now. It does not have a “phone” SIM in it, with calls and texts enabled, instead it has a 3G Data SIM from a dongle… It works OK, but there are a few issues i have with it…

• No easy way to see how much data is being used, unless you Jail Break, and then battery life goes away…
• not very hackable… other than Jail Break, and thats not hackable enough…
• not a lot of storage: 16Gb, and most of that is takin up by Music and Apps
• no background network daemons… more on that in a second…

The Network Daemons i am thinking would be useful for a WiFi Hotspot would be Squid, WANProxy, SSH, PPTP or OpenVPN Client and possibly a downloader of some sort. What i am thinking is as follows:

[UPDATED] someone asked in the comments if there was an binary build for this file. there is now! http://handbrakecluster.codeplex.com now hosts the code and binaries, and will soon have help files and documentation.

A few days back, i wrote a post titled Powershell + Handbrake + AppleTV + iTunes = Automatic TV. ish. In it i included a block of Powershell code to bulk convert TV shows from whatever format you had them in to a M4V format for the AppleTV. Well, as they say “If necessity is the mother of all invension, lazyness must be the father”. I have a lot of shows i wanted converted to the AppleTV, so i built something. Its called HandBrake Cluster and is written in .NET 4.5, uses MSMQ and Handbrake to do the processing. The workflow is as follows:

My main machine at home, known as “The GodBox” is a Dual Processor, Quad Core Xeon 5520 with 60Gb RAM, 2 300Gb 10,000 RPM Western Digital Velociraptor in RAID 0 for boot, 4X1Tb 7200RPM drives for storage, 2 more 300Gb 10,000 RPM drives for “scratch disk” and a couple high(ish) end graphics cards with 3 monitors plugged in. Hence the name, GodBox!

Anyway, The Raspberry Pi, on the other hand, has a 700Mhz processor, 256Mb RAM and not much else. So, if you need to write code for your Pi, and you don’t want to wait a long time to compile, check out this tutorial on how to build a cross compiler for your raspberry pi which will allow you to build your apps on a different machine. I have a college project which the Raspberry Pi will be used for, and i am thinking this will be how i build code.

A couple of months back, I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi, a tiny development board that can run a full copy of Linux, has an HDMI port, a couple of USB ports, Ethernet and a few other little bits and pieces. The full specs, from the Wikipedia Article, are as follows:

• Operating system: Linux (Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora, and Arch Linux ARM)
• Power: 2.5 W (model A), 3.5 W (model B)
• CPU: ARM1176JZF-S (armv6k) 700 MHz
• Storage capacity: SD card slot (SD or SDHC card)
• Memory: 256 MByte
• Graphics: Broadcom VideoCore IV

There have been a few things i have wanted to play with it for but have not implemented all of them yet. still learning. but some interesting projects have come to my attention. here they are, in no particular order: