Old Tech!

By any measure, an April 2003 manufacture date for a computer, any computer, pretty much defines it as ancient!!! It's a good thing I teach World History in my day job! 

Yet, sitting on my workbench/desk at this very moment is an IBM ThinkPad A31 with that manufacture date. It's not just sitting there; it's booted up and workings it's little P4 heart out doing a few things that I've asked the obsolete Windows XPP to do. Am I going to continue using this machine running Windows XP? Yes and No actually. Yes; I'm going to continue to use this machine (explanations in a minute). No; I'm not going to use Windows XP unless I'm just trying to test out something. And to that end, I'll be keeping the hard drive from it with the OS load intact.... in the hard drive box kinda like those people who have themselves cryogenically frozen. Then, what am I going to do with this computing Centenarian?

This of course! Except in my world, it's a quarter the size, an eighth the weight, and I don't have to buy anything! I'm going to turn it into a portable file server.

"Now, await-a-minute", you say: "so you are trying to do what a little box the size of an external drive can do"!?! I can hear the laughter now..... through the Internet. Actually, the answer is.... kind of..... Yes, I get that these drives like the Corsair Voyager Air can serve files wirelessly in an amazingly small package and do so without even being plugged in. That's cool.... but it's still not a server with a server OS loaded allowing me to have the kind of control that can only happen with an actual operating system. And now that we've established that, that operating system isn't going to be Windows XPP, what am I proposing to do here?

You might have already come to this conclusion already given the hardware. Here are some pluses and minuses associated with using them. FreeNAS can be loaded up on a USB flashdrive, thus freeing up a drive bay for storage. I don't know much about it, so there's that, and I'm going to bet the driver support is going to by a little sketchy when dealing with random devices (more on this later). That should be less of an issue with many of the various distros of Linux, some of which (such as Ubuntu/Zorin) are pretty "mainstream" these days. However, most of these are full-on OS loads requiring an actual disk drive, but more importantly taking one of my precious drive bays. On top of which I don't know a bunch about Linux, although I've loaded up and used both Ubuntu and Mint in the past. 

 

And that takes us to the orphaned Windows Home Server: no I don't even mean the newer "Vail" version which I have running on my Spectre file server right now. I mean the original v.1! Why the heck would I want to do that!?! Well.... I have it, and I have experience with it since I used it with my original Hercules file server. It's driver support will be better since it's based off of the old MS 2003 Server OS. But one of my favorite features of that version was that it had the drive extender function that allowed it to take any random drive you connect to it and aggregate it into it's management scheme. Kinda like Drobo, but in a full OS.

So.... what am I going to do? All of it of course! I'm go to load up FreeNAS on a stick, put WHS on a drive, and probably some version of Linux on another drive. Then I'm going to play with it ALL and see which one I like!

Back to the hardware. What exactly is my point with this exercise other than that I have some A31s sitting around with nothing to do? There is that, of course. The attraction of $0 acquisition cost is pretty nice. But that's not all. Not all old laptops can apply for this "Portable File Server" (PFS) job. It's a bit like that one job at Walmart. There are many senior citizens with time on their hands, but only a few make good Greeters! 

 

The A31 is a special computer.... even by ThinkPad standards. This model is often considered to be the last of the ThinkPad "mobile workstations" until the arrival of the short-lived W70x series. Let's start with what makes it a mobile workstation:

• Availability of very high end (at the time) GPUs along with the then new in mobile computing high res (1600 x 1200) IPS screens, which are still considered to be some of the best ever produced.
• Multiple (2) configurable drive bays dubbed "UltraBay" which could take; optical drives, floppy drives, removable storage such as Zip and LS-120 Superdisk, hard disk drives, battery (in 1), as well as PDA (Palm Pilot) dock and/or "10-Key" number pad.
• Pentium 4m (Mobile) processors in excess of 2ghz.
• Full expansion capabilities including 2 PCMCIA slots and a docking port. This translates to either a port replicator, or the 2631 Dock that had another UltraBay slot, 2 more Cardbus PCMCIA slots, internal power supply AND full length PCI card slot.

  

"Wow", you say.... what in the heck does all that mean? OK, I'll put you outta your misery. All this expansion give the A31 (and A30, but they are PIII) machines the ability to have up to 3 spinning drives of virtually any combination on board. When you add in the dock, it's a 4th drive. The PCMCIA cardbus slot gives it the ability to overcome one of it's deficiencies, which is that it's chipset is so old, it doesn't even have USB 2.0. Yup, that's right.... USB 1.1! So, one Adaptec USB2.0/Firewire card later, it now has the ability to interact with more external drives at a higher speed. And I just so happen to have a 500Gb drive in a Lacie Firewire external enclosure. The full PCI slot in the dock also give me the ability to put in pretty much anything else I might need as well. 

It's no wonder that NASA chose these machine to go on the Space Shuttle and later the International Space Station.

When you combine this machine, it's various modular capabilities, the ThinkPad 2631 dock, and my wife's old Samsonite rolling case; it quickly become a fully portable, file server ready for use in virtually any location at any time. Not bad for a $0 cost build.

We Are Here To Serve

I've gotta say; I'm a little obsessed with servers. It probably has something to do with age as well, as actual functionality. I've talked a few times about growing up during the time of mainframes and mini-computers before PCs came to rule the land. When, "getting on" a computer, meant logging on to a "terminal". 

For us old fogies, the concept of a server was these mysterious inner sanctums filled with racks, wires and blinking lights. If I lived in another part of the country where basements were a reality vs. a pipe-dream, I'd have done it myself. So instead, I routinely watch videos made by these guys who have created a little underground domain where they take cast-off corporate gear and turn it into their dreams. 

 

As for me, my dreams have to be small and smaller. Our primary server is built in a Silverstone Precision PS-07 case. It's really a micro-ATX case for the motherboard of the same form-factor. It really isn't just the lack of space that has forced these decisions, but as much or more the low draw of the equipment that I've picked. For me it's been a very fine line. The desire to keep everything "low draw" is balanced by performance and flexibility. Of course the low-draw side always keeps me looking at the simple NAS (network attached storage) boxes out there on the market. In fact, that very attraction has kept me in an ongoing flirtation with an eBay auction for a Buffalo LinkStation Mini for the last three plus weeks. Somebody out in California has had one of them listed three times. They started at a BIN of $110 which was a good price for these things with an original list price over $200, but it failed to sell, then they dropped it to $95, then to $85 at which it finally sold today. If it had dropped to $75, that was going to be the "breakpoint" for me! What it is is a very small (as you can see) NAS designed around space for 2, 2.5" laptop drives. In addition to that, there was even an additional USB port to allow for expansion. I don't know what I was going to do with it, but the idea is just too cool for me not to contemplate.

What I really need though, was some way to implement cloud computing for my wife's and my own classroom needs. It would also be useful for the kids to stream to, on their tablets vs. setting up FTP. I've looked into this in two different directions. 

One is the commercially available Corsair Voyager Air. It's a really interesting concept that marries a portable hard drive of either 500Gb or 1Tb to a WiFi access point, inside a case with a battery. The result is a portable cloud that allows use anywhere from conference room to vehicle. It's also $200 and brand new.... meaning that there's virtually none on the used market. End of discussion for a frugal propellerhead.

Another is the PogoPlug, which is also commercially available, but a little less mainstream. If you haven't heard of it, that not surprising. They haven't exactly been overwhelming the media with advertising, but it's never-the-less a very interesting concept as well. Basically, this is how it works: instead of having your files hosted in "the cloud" on someone else's random server and paying for that priviledge on a monthly or yearly basis, you buy this box from PogoPlug, attach your storage to it, then it is funneled through PogoPlug's servers where you (or whoever you give permission to) access it, but the files themselves stay on your drive. This is very attractive to most people since, you have far greater control. However there is clearly puts you into a situation of having to deal with upload bandwidth and speed as related to your individual ISP. Still, it's an interesting idea and worth looking into, especially considering the current Series 4 device as depicted above has not only a SATA connector, an SD card reader, but the ability to connect 1 USB 2.0, and 2 USB 3.0 devices ranging from flash drives to external hard drives. 

All this navel examination happened due to my freeing up one of my boxes and moving some of the old Blackbird parts over there. The situation is that I have an unused computer with my choice of 2 socket 775; one a relatively high-end Gigabyte GA-EP45, and the other a decidedly low-end GA-G41M board. It's not a particularly relevant issue since they both take the same processors and have the basic features I need, such a several SATA connectors, PCI and PCIe slots. My original though was to take my stack of old PATA drives, load FreeNAS onto a USB flash drive and "play". This was right around the time that my wife's and my brain synchronized onto the concept of "Cloud Computing". If you've spent much time looking at what it takes to get FreeNAS out there on the internet as a cloud server, you have probably realized that it's not really for novices playing around with it for the first time. 

  .....Which brings me back to......PogoPlug! While I was reading about it and thinking; "hey, that's cool and not really relevant to me", since I couldn't figure out a way to connect my big box to their device, I came across a reference to their some software that they sell for $29.95...... which, when loaded, allows that computer to behave like their device! TaDa! I don't even need to do anything special, just load up Windows 7 on the box, download the PopoPlug applications and hello Cloud Computing! I'm sure it won't be as simple as that, but I'll keep you updated as I progress into this new world servers.