Retrograde File Server

Not long ago, I talked about my "amok time" when I went a little bit storage drive crazy. As part of that, I bought several Hitachi drives, one of which was a 2Tb Deskstar that filled out the connections of the HighPoint RocketCache 3240X8. This RAID controller has the capability to handle up to 4 SATA drives that can be any combination of SSDs and HDDs. Of course, at least one of them must be an SSD of up to 64Gb in order to take advantage of the caching aspects of the RAID set up. If you've been following along over the course of the last year or so, you're probably aware of it being a part of the Spectre upgrade from my original Hercules file server.

 

The whole shebang was built into a Silverstone Precision Series PS-07, Micro-ATX case that literally was just the right height to fit into the space I had for it. It went together great, and that case, as expected was big enough for all the drives, quiet and unobtrusive..... everything you want in a file server. Over time though, I've become increasingly unhappy with the HighPoint controller. It started off poorly with the included disk that had the wrong software, exacerbated by really, really bad documentation that made me reminescent about 70's Japanese model instructions! The thing that has bugged me this whole time was that it's RAID setup made one of the 2, 2Tb drives disappear entirely (no, it's not set up as mirrored). The capper was when I initialized the 3rd, 2Tb drive, the controller made that disappear as well! While, I'm a 100% certain that it probably can be rectified by some settings in the user UNfriendly software, I've decided that it's just not worth the continued hassle. 

Right in the middle of all this hoo-ha, I had decided to pull the living room HTPC and sell off it's guts for an upgrade. Although the Gigabyte GA-EP45 motherboard isn't worth much, the 8Gb of Mushkin RAM sitting in it could fetch upwards of $100+! As my sell-off/upgrade/purchase routines tend to be intricate and linked; it occurred to me that as an HTPC in today's world, it completely didn't need the power of a "Core" machine. I had retrograded my bedroom HTPC from a Westmere i3 to a Celeron of that generation with no ill results at all. It occurred to me that the "Brazos"-chipped Asus E35M1-M Pro board was completely wasting the graphical end of it's APU concept living out it's life as a file server in a cabinet! The features that originally drew me to it as a server board such as fanless processor, lack of need for a graphics card, and USB 3.0 were just as, if not more valuable in an HTPC. On top of which, a change to a different board would allow me the opportunity to resolve a few issues that has to do with personal quirks.

One of them being that I've always used an IBM RT-3200 compact TrackPoint keyboard as my server interface. Yes, I'm aware that most people imply use the web interface, but you might be aware that I'm not like other people! In fact, one of the four monitors in my desk setup has it's VGA input connected to the server to I can interact with it directly. I've tried KVMs and don't like them. Hey; at least this way, I don't have to have a separate mouse, which by the way is the reason I've always struggled with the Asus E35 MB. It only has one PS/2 port and no adapter I've ever tried (4) has allowed me to ability to connect both of those functions on my RT-3200. 

After quite a bit of head-scratching and research, I settled on an Intel DQ965GF. Why this board? Well.... you already know about the 2 PS/2 ports. So here are some other items that I really liked: Intel Gigabit NIC (can we say way faster than Realtek), 4 RAM sockets, integrated graphic (natch), 8 (vs. 4 or 6) SATA ports, 2 PCI slots, 2 PCIe slots, 6 USB ports on the back panel (plus 2 more headers on the MB), and socket 775 for which I got both dual core CPU and a quiet HSF in hand. There are some other random items that might come into play at some point such as Firewire, and a parallel port as well, but who knows right? This board ended up costing me $17! I bought a $12.99 PCI-e card to give me 2 USB 3.0 ports on the back panel, plus an internal header that will give me front-panel USB 3.0 for the first time. For some inexplicable reason the Asus board only had that on the back panel! Anything else? 

I'm considering an alternative to using Windows Home Server 2011. Not sure yet. That may be a down the road thing, after I've fully tested it out on the test server that's at school. 

At the very least, I'll finally be able to see all 6Tb of storage from the 3 Hitachi 2Tb drives! I'm also going to plug up the old Antec SATA "hotswap" drive bay in the other 5.25" location. This thing will allow me to move data in bulk directly from the Blackbird workstation to the file server. It has two "hotswap" drive bays one of which has a Hitachi 1.5Tb drive in it for exactly that purpose. This will allow me to move files at SATA bus speed which is WAY faster than even Gigabit Ethernet! So yeah..... I'm doing one of those moving forward by taking a step back things. The Stay tuned and see how this turns out.

Old School ThinkPad

I go through so many computers, that sometimes a machine will fall through the cracks. Although, I'll occasionally need to clean out "the crumbs", I'll also find that jewel as well. In this case, it was the titanium lidded Z61m that I had worked diligently on to bring back from "discarded project" of another ThinkPadder to become a "do-everything" mobile workstation. Unfortunately, it never fully came to fruition due to a locked BIOS. Now, I've dealt with other machines with the BIOS locked before, and in general it's not an issue, however this particular machine wasn't recognizing the wifi card. I tried a number of cards with the same results. It came down to that it was either a defect on the board with was highly unlikely, or that it was shut off in the BIOS somewhere. This is not a very good state of affairs for a mobile workstation! After a while it fell by the wayside, especially since around that time I fell under a proverbial avalanche of ThinkPads! On top of that, many of those machines were more updated (T61), or more powerful (T60p). So, it sat forlornly in the "boneyard" under the workbench. It even suffered the ignominity of giving up it's updated parts (T7200 CPU, 4Gb RAM, 80Gb SSD) to other "front-burner" projects. 

When things were looking it's worse, a plot-twist appeared. As part of my OTP (Old ThinkPad) Server project, I was reexamining my stock of IDE/PATA laptop drives and decided to clear them out while their value was high. I listed them on the ThinkPad forum, from which an acquaintance offered a trade for one of the 160Gb drives. Among the things he had to offer was a derelict, but working Z61m! A couple of nights ago, the working base of his Z61m got mated to my screen and other top parts. The parts box coughed up 4Gb of RAM that came out of my old X300, and a 160Gb Intel X18 SSD. 

Then this morning, after a BIOS "whitelist" hack, it got an Atheros 5418 "N" wireless card! This was the capper! The very reason that it originally ended up under the bench. Now, it can be a fully MOBILE workstation! Yeah, I gave up a nicer ATI Mobility Radeon GPU on the other board, but the reality is that, it's not something I'll really miss given what I'll be using this machine to do. What'll this machine be expected to do?

In a word..... "gruntwork", that's what. My primary portable computer is the uber-sleek ThinkPad X1, however, it's a sports car of laptops. You can haul tree branches in a Porsche, but you won't find it very enjoyable. The old red pickup (Z61m) of laptops, on the other hand, may not be very sleek, or up-to-date, but it can do pretty much anything...... not fast, or stylishly, but it'll do it without complaint.

 

Storage Is Driving Me Crazy!

OK; maybe this "Fisheye" view of the Fermi labs' data center is stretching it a bit, but I've gone a bit storage crazy lately. I guess, my little digital world at home is a microcosm of our data oriented world at large. I have a lot of data, and it seems to be growing at an exponential rate. The main source of the growth is my movie ripping project. At this point, I'm at about 325 films. This creates two issues. One is the "basic" file of the movie once the incription has been stripped away. It's a pretty big file. That's why I use Handbrake to crunch it down to a more manageable 1-1.5Gb file in an MP4 format. This gives me a relatively decent looking picture on a small screen such as a tablet or even notebook computer. However, I don't want to get rid of the original file, so I don't have to rip the thing again in the future. Of course, that leaves me with a lot of data to store. Just the MP4s alone add up to 400Gb of data..... and I'm not even halfway through my library!

As I'm accumulating this stuff, I've progressively felt a "space"-crunch. Given that my server had 2, 2Tb drives in it, plus a 3Tb backup, I'm not certain that's real, or just my head playing games with me! Be that as it may, I start adding drives at the end of the summer. Here's how it went down. I bought Hitachi drives whenever I could. Based on my experience and things that I've read, they seem to be the best bet on a $$$ vs. life-span equation. I used to be a Western Digital guy, but over time, my loyalty such as it is, has progressively moved over to Hitachi. Now, that they've been bought out by the big WD, I guess the issue is moot. In the last several months, I found a few good deals and bought 1, 2Tb, and 2, 1.5Tb Deskstar drives. The 2Tb one went into the file server and took the last spot on the HighPoint caching RAID controller giving it 6Tb of internal storage. The 1.5Tb drives have gone to live in the workstation to augment the 1Tb drive that was rapidly filling up. I've configured it where one of them is permanently attached (like the 1Tb drive), and the other residing in one of the two "hot-swap" bays. This will give not only quadruple the storage space, but will allow me the ability to use it as "removable mass storage". I can put LOTS of data on that drive; kick it out without opening the case, and plug it into the file server moving the data at SATA III bus speed!

As things like this seem to happen, more storage possibilities fell on me "out of nowhere". While discussing selling/trading a laptop drive with someone, he offered me a Toshiba Canvio, external hard drive case (with power supply) for almost nothing. Of course I took it! Actually, it's a clone of the 3Tb external that I have attached to the file server as a "backup". The interface is USB 3.0, so pretty quick. Now, all I have to do is find a deal on a big disk to go in it. Most likely, it'll be a Toshiba, as they seem to run specials on them regularly after Toshiba ended up with most of Hitachi's desktop drive manufacture capacity during that sell-off. I'm not real certain what I'd do with another 2 or 3Tb external drive, but you know what they say: "you can never have too much storage".

As if the portable side of my digital life was feeling left out, things started hopping there as well. While looking for drives, I ran across a 2.5" Orico USB 3.0 drive enclosure for cheap ($12). So, I bought it and put a spare 500Gb drive in it. This thing gave me the ability to move large amounts of data around quickly due to the USB 3.0 interface. Very convenient when both my brother-in-law AND I were ripping our movies and need a good way to consolidate the files on one drive. The almost 400Gb of movies fit on there great.

WAY better than what had been my one and only USB 3.0 device; the iOmega SSD Flash drive. While it's super fast with a 1.8" Intel X18 SSD in it; the storage size of 80Gb wasn't big enough to do anything serious. Essentially, it's just a big flash drive.

Right in the middle of all this, I started working on my OTP (Old ThinkPad) Server project. An outgrowth of it was to use my Lacie Porsche Design external drive enclosures.The only issue here was that not only was the enclosure IEEE-1394 (Firewire) interface, but internally, it's IDE/PATA! After digging around, I was able to find that I had a Seagate (I know, I know...I had it, so what're ya gonna do?) that came out of an old machine. Now I need to find another one, (hopefully, this time, a non-Seagate) for the it's twin. While working on that project, I learned from another "ThinkPadder" that you can buy an UltraBay 2000 adapter that will take SATA drives. This will give me the ability to put in any size I want in the internal bays of the A31 up to 12.7mm in height. I believe the largest capacity of that physical size is 1.5Tb. However, I'll go with a Seagate 500Gb drive that came in a machine I was given when they upgraded. I know; another Seagate, but it's hard to turn down free!!!

While all the storage madness was going on..... I filled out a survey. "What you talkin' about Willis!?!" OK, I didn't just fill out a survey, but wrote a review too, on my "new" X1. In return, Lenovo sent me a coupon for a promotion to get an F800, Multi-Mode storage device for half off! What is it? It's a 1Tb USB 3.0 external hard drive with it's own battery (which can charge other devices like phones), and a built-in access point. You might have also notice the Ethernet port as well. And you'd be right! It can function as a network "bridge" as well! Hard to tell from this picture, but imagine an regular 2.5" portable drive, but fatter.

That's 7! I've added 7 terabytes of storage in the last month....and I'm not even through. I'll probably add another 2 or 3 over the course of the next few months as well. I'm a little be astounded myself.

ThinkPad Triumph!

They say: "Every Dog Has His Day"! I say: every computer problem has a solution.... almost anyway. You guys know that last week was a disaster in all manner of ways. I figured that over the course of the week, things would resolve themselves like they always do:

• On my day off with the sick daughter; I finished repairing the fence by building a new gate.
• Then I resolved my problematic R60 ThinkPad issue.
• I got a cool offer from Lenovo for half-off of a new device.... which I took advantage of!
• Got another of the R60s up and running with a different OS.

I gotta tell ya; I LOVE Windows 7! When given enough RAM and a halfway decent set of hardware, it'll run with the best of 'em. Essentially, it's like a modern Windows XP! That's a high compliment indeed if I do say so myself. When I moved the hardware from the R60 that was freezing up to another one of those machines; it was like magic! All I did was to take the T7200 cpu, the 4Gb of RAM and Intel 40Gb SSD out of the one machine and put it in another one and "BAM" (like Emeril Lagasse would say), it just worked. I took it to show my Principal how fast those machines could be made to work and he was suitably impressed. Now it's in the hands of one of my computer club student/minions for long-term stabilty testing. 

I was so excited that the very next evening, I loaded up the previously freezing-up R60 with Zorin OS 9 and showed that to my Principal as the "proof-of-concept" for what I wanted to do with the rest of the 26 R60s (and possibly 100+ X200s) sitting on selves in a closet! I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed with how simple Zorin was to work on coming from Windows. Now for the ultimate test! I'm going to try and put it in the hands of one of my least hardware savy computer club minions for daily trials. Stay tuned!

While all this was going on, I went on a shopping binge.... the Frugal Propellerhead way! You guys know that for the last several months, I've been busy helping a number of people buy computers. You might, or might not have figured out that I mostly make little, if anything on these gigs. It's kind of like playing in a weekend band. However, besides the occasional old computer they throw out, there is a little bit of a silver lining. The majority of these purchases come on eBay, and for the last couple of years, they've had this little incentive program called "eBay Bucks" which returns a tiny percent back to you from the purchases four times a year. A bit like what credit card companies do with their loyalty points. Over the last quarter, I've had a lot of these purchases ranging from the Dell Precision workstation laptop for a former student going to college to the ThinkPad X1 for a co-worker. All this ended up netting me a whopping $57 in eBay Bucks for the quarter that ended on September 30th! Don't scoff: in the Frugal Propellerhead world, $57 and some cents is no laughing matter! Basically, it allows me to rationalize buying things that don't really have a real purpose. 

I know what you're thinking: Really; what in the heck is this weird stuff!?! OK. From top to bottom, it goes as follows. A Cooler Master 4-in-3 drive cage. It's purpose is to go into my old Cooler Master Centurion 5 case that I'm turning into a file server. Although it was actually designed for this case, it can be used in any computer tower that has 3, 5.25" external bays and turn it into a, fan-cooled drive cage that can hold 4, 3.5" hard drives. The second device is a portable USB 3.0 Hub/Card Reader that in one device will allow my ThinkPad X1's single 3.0 port to do multiple things. And the last is a rather difficult to find, power supply for one of my Lacie "Porsche" external Firewire hard drive enclosures. That will not allow me to use the other of them "daisy-chained" together as external storage for the "Old ThinkPad Server" project that I'm building out of an A31. It's just $60 worth of stuff; why not just buy it and have done with it? It's all part of my philosophy and the purpose of this blog to start with. Finding ways to do things as cheaply as possible and if possible using old repurposed technology.

Setback Week

OK; it wasn't as bad as this, but it was a pretty bad week all-around..... technology and otherwise. It started out with my ThinkPad R60 to "ChromeBook" project repeatedly locking up after upgrades. Who would've thought that simple speed upgrades like CPU, RAM and SSD, loaded with Windows 7 would toss cookies!

That was followed by the otherwise working MacBook steadfastly refusing to load up Snow Leopoard!

Then came the weekend of homeowner disasters. First; there was the little storm on Thursday night which blew down 3 sections of fencing along with the gate. That was followed by my 3-year-old nephew pulling down the 47" flat-panel and breaking it during my birthday party on Saturday! On Sunday, I pretty much spent the day working on the fence followed by daughter coming in during the night running 101.3 degree fever. We had Monday off. So of course, that was more time for fence-work, after which the family went out for the birthday dinner. OH....IT GETS BETTER! Daughter starts feeling bad, so we get it to-go. Then over to the sister-in-laws house for a quick hearing test for the wife (don't ask) who rolls her ankle and falls on the way out of the house! At least that solved, who was going to sit at home with daughter today! 

Guess what I get to do while I take my turn staying home with the feverish daughter? Yup.... I'm the fence-building maniac! 

Hey; at least I'll have a little time to work on the R60.... when I get the fence finished that is. Did I mention that I've been down sick with the flu ever since I got over the latest bout of Cat Scratch Fever a week ago? Maybe the French did have it right and I'd have been better off giving up in the first place!

"Old Tech" Step By Step

Before my OTP (Old ThinkPad) can become a rolling form of this, it needed a few things.

An operating system that can serve as a decent server, and run stably on old hardware. As it turned out, the most obvious solution, Windows Home Server v1 didn't like my A31. The load threw all manner of errors during the install and generally "acted a fool". From there, I moved on to Ubuntu, which ran very well, but I just didn't like it very much. After a suggestion by one of my internet friends from the ThinkPad Forum, I decided to give CentOS a try. Once I got the ISO burned properly, the load went very smoothly. Everything was recognized and the old P4, with the 2Gb RAM (max) was responding like something a couple of generations newer!

A little bit of this, and Samba was downloaded..... not configured mind you, but downloaded! The configuring part could wait. What I needed to was make sure that the machine would talk to my drives.

The first order of business was to get this sorted out. What is it? Well; it's a hard drive adapter for the UltraBay 2000K (UB2K) generation of ThinkPads. I'm not completely certain, but it's a pretty safe bet that IBM invented the concept of the replaceable device "bay" going all the way to the original ThinkPad. Back in those days, there were many devices that weren't built-in on notebook computers, so there needed to be all manner of standardized (PCMCIA) and quasi-standardized connections to allow devices to attach. The A31 is unique in that it didn't have just one like the run-of-the-mill corporate notebooks, but TWO!!! However, they didn't behave the same. One of my issues was to figure out whether CentOS would recognize devices in these bays other than the normal optical drives and floppies. As it turned out, after some experimenting, it was learned that a second hard drive could be placed in the right-side bay, but not the left. It didn't matter how I set the "boot sequence", the machine would hang trying to boot from the UB2K drive if it was in the left side! When this was confirmed and I could access the secondary drive through the Drive Utility, I was set. Optical drive in the left and hard disk drive in the right. This gives me replaceable storage of relatively large sizes, although it was limited to PATA/IDE drives which is a problem. More on this later.

Next came the dock. In this case, I went with the ThinkPad Dock II, Model 2877 because: a) it's newer than the original 2631 and b) I have it. This "dock" was actually designed for the later T4x machines, but IBM, being IBM made it backwards compatible. So, what's so special about it? OK, first of all; it's an actual DOCKING STATION (hence dock) meaning that it has capabilities of its own beyond what is built into the machine attached to it. Most people call what is in reality a port replicator, a dock. They are wrong. You'll notice that it's quite a bit deeper than the typical port replicator. That's because it has it's own power supply (so no need for the adapter), two more PCMCIA card slots, a half-length PCI card slot, and another UltraBay. On top of that, there are the normal pass-throughs for things like video, serial and parallel interface and floppy disk drive. For all intents and purposes, these things make a notebook computer a full desktop in miniature. It turns out that the A31 running CentOS has so far completely recognized this thing so I can attach all manner of devices to it..... SCORE!

 

The last 2 devices that I needed to get going were the Adaptec AUA-1422 PCMCIA adapter that would give the A31 USB 2.0, and most importantly IEEE 1394 (AKA Firewire).... that's because, I have an old Lacie "Firewire" external drive with a 500Gb hard drive in it. I've had both of these devices forever, and finding a way to use them productively would the the icing on the cake! In fact, I have a second Lacie enclosure that would daisy-chain nicely if it worked. To make a long story short, it worked, all of it. I was able to connect, have the disk recognize, partition and format for Linux in short order. 

So, the concept is almost complete. I can take this old notebook that most people would consider obsolete, set it up almost anywhere as a full blown file server, or pretty much any other service that Linux has in it's bag of tricks. With the various add-ons that it recognizes, I can access an almost limitless amount of storage! 

Now, on to the next (more difficult) stage of the project. Learning how to configure and administer a Linux file server.
 

iPads Are of the Devil!

There it is, the baaaad beasty! Just look at it! What harm could it be, I asked myself? Just one little iPad for my wife so she could test classroom kid apps on iOS against the Android. We were an Android house with 4 Android tablets running variously "Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich". 

Then this happened. I got a great deal from a co-worker upgrading and asked my wife if she wanted it. "Sure", she said "What could it hurt"? Then she decided that iOS was more kid-centric on educational apps. And of course (as you know), iPad 1s can't be upgraded beyond iOS 5. 

You can predict what happened next right? This right here, of course! We bought a "2" (got a great deal by the way), and the original became Katie's, but mom wasn't terribly pleased because it wouldn't run the same apps. What to do?

This happened of course! Apparently, any idiot knows you don't let 2 iPads into your house....except me of obviously! So, we sell the offending iPad 1, and put the money into a partial payment for the.......

iPad Air for my wife, who then passes the iPad 2 down to Katie. Now you figure, we were finished right? Ohhhh, Nooooo! Now we had an issue of the one child using the iPad and the other who didn't have the same apps to work on. You try having an 8 year old girl share "her iPad" with her 11-year old brother!

That's when this happened! Within a short amount of time, we got Josh a Mini for his birthday, then later in the summer, decided that we were better off with both kids on Minis instead of Katie trying to tote around the much bigger "2", which became the wife's "school" iPad to use in the classroom as she moved to a Mac-centric district. 

In my mind's eye; it was this..... or this!!!

The effect was this! It was now the end of the summer and the school year was looming. I was tasked with the job of selling off the 9 old laptops that the wife had used in her classroom. I started selling old ThinkPads one after another and putting away the money. I won't regale you with the detaileds, but when the dust settled and it was "said and done" a week ago. We had as follows:

• 1 iPad Air 32Gb- Momma's personal property "NO TRESPASSING" by commoners
• 2 iPad 2s 16Gb/1 iPad Mini- Classroom iPads for working in "stations"
• 1 iPad 2 16Gb- Provided by her district for the teacher and used in her "stations"
• 1 iPad Mini Retina 16Gb- Katie's (she of the bad eyes) tablet
• 1 iPad Mini 16Gb- Josh's (he of the better eyes) tablet

That's 7 of these things if you count the school's and 6 if you don't! What am I using?

Well, duh! Did you expect Batman to start wearing green with gold bling? So, score one for the good guys! I did tell, my "Mac is great" brother-in-law" about the onslaught and he laughed, say "ahhh, iPads; the gateway drug of iOS". 

So you all should see this as a cautionary tale!