When my wife and I built our house, I got the green light to geek it out. I installed 48 ethernet ports into a 50 port managed switch sitting in a rack full of 4U cases with full UPS coverage for all. I had 3 or 4 desktops at a time and computers abounded throughout the house. Now we are selling the house and moving so we have to strip everything bare, just the essentials left in the house (we still have to live here while we try to sell). All the desktops are gone, the rack is gone, the switch is still in place but mounted into a custom cabinet to make it fit in. We are down to a single server, UPS and 2 laptops but I gotta say, I'm really pleased. I discovered xen a few years back, switching to it from Usermode Linux. I now have a single box that acts like as many machines as I can afford RAM for. The computers in the bedroom that used to run mythtv frontends were replaced with Hauppauge MediaMVPs. The laptops go everywhere we go and the rest of the gear I gave away. My UPS tells me that I went from drawing on average over 12 amps to a measly 1.8. Tell me I didn't notice that on my monthly power bill, and that was just at the rack!
yeah 440 is no joke. My Father was hit by 440 while working on an AC unit on the roof of a building. laid there for over an hour before they came to find him (some ass removed his lock-out-tag-out from the breaker panel a few floors down thinking it was left over from previous work). He ended up with some really nasty burns on his hands and a heart condition that he later had to have parts of his heart killed off to correct. Essentialy a short circuit in his heart that they assume came from the previous jolt that was letting the signals telling one valve to fire cross over to the other valve.
Plus, 120V AC current, if you get shocked, hurts like a B#TCH, but just leaves your ego bruised. 120V DC current will instantly cause your heart to stop
actually that is not entirely correct. 10ma of current across your heart period will cause serious issues be it DC or AC. In fact, DC is actually safer then AC when it comes to turning yourself into a light bulb. When the power grid was first being created, DC proponents used to fry small animals to prove that AC was unsafe while DC would do no damage. Granted, a DC power grid would need a power generation station almost every 3 blocks.
As a side, don't be fooled, 110v AC can kill you dead just like 400v AC can. It's all about your bodies internal resistance mostly due to moisture and the path the power takes.
actually, all of these are from my experience here at home. That one in particular will cause my intel pro 100 nic running 100full to drop link for about half to 1 second. If you are moving any data, windows freaks out. Fun to troubleshoot.
Take a hub and plug it into your switch. You have to use a hub for this to work, or if you have a really cheesy switch I guess it could work without the hub. Now take an ethernet cable and plug both ends into the hub. Viola, instant layer 2 loop.
Run an ethernet cable (yours perhaps) next to a space heater/box fan/large electric motor of your choice. Periodicaly turn that motor on and off. Instant link loss due to a spike on the line. WARNING, this one could jack up your switch/computer so be sensible.
If you are really green, give your roommate and your computer the same IP.
Take a short ethernet cable and untwist it (take it out of its shielding and untwist the wires). Put it back together in various ways and see how fast/slow your download rates become.
sounds like you built it backwards. you are supposed to build LVM ontop of RAID, that way a single drive blowing out isn't even noticable (if you did RAID1).
If I might add a comment to your last point. IDE drives take a performance hit when you are working with master and slave devices period. This is not a tradeoff of software raid but just a general issue with ide. You can run software raid across master and slave devices just fine, I do right now both at home and on 168 linux boxes where I work, and we hold the service those boxes provide to 5 9's. The only issue I have ever had with software raid has been throughput. You just cant beat a nice fiberchannel enclosure and a massive controller card to get the data rates up, but that is why we put our databases on the SAN and use software raid for the frontends. Now, yes the howto says not to have both of your drives on the same ide channel in case the bus itself freaks out and starts puking bits all over your drives, but how many people have you met or heard of that have lost data because their ide bus died? Not saying it can't happen, just saying that for most of us, this really isn't a huge concern. Besides, we all have backups, right?
I thought about going to such an arrangement with my employer, but it has one huge drawback. When layoff time comes, you are the guy that no one ever sees and therefore no one will ever miss. No matter how much work you do, face time counts for a lot.
You should try chrooting an apache process that runs in User-mode linux. I run all of my servers out of UML now, even samba and my wireless access point. It keeps my server busy, but it always pained me to see it idle anyways.
I use a Neoware neostation 2000. Its a Cyrix 233 chip with an SODIMM and DIMM slot, an IDE header, a PCI slot and sound/nic/video all built in. I net boot mine because I have ethernet strung everywhere, but since their is an IDE header you could easily just pop a drive in there. The unit is totally fanless and has lasted in my garage for some time. Not the fastest thing in the world, but runs linux well, surfs the web and plays mp3's just fine.
I agree, I had no bones with Walmart until I got this reply from them.
...We
never stated or advertised what the processor speed was of the item. The
name of the processor according to ECS is a AMD Athlon 1600+ pro. This
is very similar to that of the AMD AThlon XPM 1600+...
That's when my problem became with Walmart. They respond as if Im some sort of idiot and I'm supposed to thank them from protecting me from the big bad marketing drones on their own site! BTW, they did advertise that unit as an XPM, I kept a copy of the original add. When I sent it to them, they stopped responding to my emails.
Be wary of these walmart laptops. I purchased one, come to find out the CPU was not what I was sold. When I confronted walmart, they told me that they never said what the CPU really was and just because AMD likes to call their chips one thing doesnt mean they have to comply! More at www.jasonandjessi.com/a535.html . Oh, and Im not the only one.
I have a feeling that in those households the computer was looked at much like the TV. A plugin babysitter that keeps junior quiet and out of the way. When used in that manner, yeah the computer can have some negative impacts on your kid. People seem to have forgotten that children need to be stimulated and challenged. TV and the internet can be great tools but can also be pretty mind numbing. My wife and I are about to have our first kid and have been talking about these type of things at length and we both feel very strongly that it is our job to make sure that our son is engaged in things that he finds entertaining but that have more value to them then simply "at least he's quiet". That means we have to actually spend time with our son, in fact, we have to take an interest in his daily life (gasp)! It always shocks me how many parents in our neighborhood either don't know where their kids are and what they are doing or prefer to just sit them down in front of some gizmo instead of getting involved in what they are doing. But hey, we haven't actually had our kid yet, so of course right now I have all the answers and know exactly how it's all gonna work out. Check back in around 10 years.
I just ordered a new laptop for 580 bucks from tiger direct (melt down sell on an acer travelmate) I like it, it's linux friendly and portable. Why bother with a tower anymore?
Gotta agree. I have never had a single problem with linux software raid once I understood how it worked. The maxtor drives, on the other hand, have been nothing but trouble. The issue is componded by the fact that maxtor replaces your busted drive with a remanufactored drive (perhaps all the vendors do, I've never had another vendors drive blow out while still under warranty) and of course, they fail several drives at a time.
Your books always seem to be painstakingly researched. Which comes first, the desire to write the book which creates the need for the research, or the research inspiring you to write the book?
Dont be so sure about that. Drs are required to keep your health records secure because of things like HIPA, but Im not sure about your financial records. I believe that's just a matter of good buisness, but I could be way wrong.
I have never had a single issue with my Epson CX5200, never even had to clean the nozzels and it goes through at least one round of ink every month! I even printed off all of our wedding photos instead of paying for reprints, that was almost 400 5x7 prints! Are you buying the most inexpensive printers and running them hard? Do you have your printer sitting next to a window/TV/Monitor/computer vent where it and the paper will collect more dust then it should? Perhaps your fix will be as simple as just moving your printer to a cleaner/drier spot.
changing a mac is trivial, specially when I can spend 5 minutes listening to your traffic and getting your MAC. Then I just "borrow" it when you are done. MAC filtering is not safe, it will only slow the determined down by the slightest bit.
I had a very similar issue and my fix ended up being 100% geek.
File Server: Nokia IP330 firewall. Bought it for 50 bucks with a dead harddrive. Just a 1U box with an AMD K6-2 and 64 meg of RAM. This box sucks the most power of all my servers, but I needed the extra umph to run linux software raid.
Firewall: WRT54G with the sveasoft firmware. Works like a charm and even supports 802.1q tagging on the wired side (with a little work)
Mail Server: This is the fun one. NeoStation 3000 X Station. 233mhz Geode processor (30 bucks on ebay), very low power and low noise. Put the board in a case from an Intel iPivot (50 bucks on ebay) and we're good to go
The whole thing is sitting in a rack I made out of 2x4s and powered by a Clary Onguard UPS (50 bucks on ebay). The only real power hog I have is my switch, it's an old Bay (you guessed it, 50 bucks on ebay). This can be done in a real fun, and cheap, way. Just look for used equipment and remember, darn near everything will run linux or NetBSD.
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so say we all
When my wife and I built our house, I got the green light to geek it out. I installed 48 ethernet ports into a 50 port managed switch sitting in a rack full of 4U cases with full UPS coverage for all. I had 3 or 4 desktops at a time and computers abounded throughout the house. Now we are selling the house and moving so we have to strip everything bare, just the essentials left in the house (we still have to live here while we try to sell). All the desktops are gone, the rack is gone, the switch is still in place but mounted into a custom cabinet to make it fit in. We are down to a single server, UPS and 2 laptops but I gotta say, I'm really pleased. I discovered xen a few years back, switching to it from Usermode Linux. I now have a single box that acts like as many machines as I can afford RAM for. The computers in the bedroom that used to run mythtv frontends were replaced with Hauppauge MediaMVPs. The laptops go everywhere we go and the rest of the gear I gave away. My UPS tells me that I went from drawing on average over 12 amps to a measly 1.8. Tell me I didn't notice that on my monthly power bill, and that was just at the rack!
yeah 440 is no joke. My Father was hit by 440 while working on an AC unit on the roof of a building. laid there for over an hour before they came to find him (some ass removed his lock-out-tag-out from the breaker panel a few floors down thinking it was left over from previous work). He ended up with some really nasty burns on his hands and a heart condition that he later had to have parts of his heart killed off to correct. Essentialy a short circuit in his heart that they assume came from the previous jolt that was letting the signals telling one valve to fire cross over to the other valve.
Plus, 120V AC current, if you get shocked, hurts like a B#TCH, but just leaves your ego bruised. 120V DC current will instantly cause your heart to stop
actually that is not entirely correct. 10ma of current across your heart period will cause serious issues be it DC or AC. In fact, DC is actually safer then AC when it comes to turning yourself into a light bulb. When the power grid was first being created, DC proponents used to fry small animals to prove that AC was unsafe while DC would do no damage. Granted, a DC power grid would need a power generation station almost every 3 blocks.
As a side, don't be fooled, 110v AC can kill you dead just like 400v AC can. It's all about your bodies internal resistance mostly due to moisture and the path the power takes.
actually, all of these are from my experience here at home. That one in particular will cause my intel pro 100 nic running 100full to drop link for about half to 1 second. If you are moving any data, windows freaks out. Fun to troubleshoot.
Take a hub and plug it into your switch. You have to use a hub for this to work, or if you have a really cheesy switch I guess it could work without the hub. Now take an ethernet cable and plug both ends into the hub. Viola, instant layer 2 loop.
Run an ethernet cable (yours perhaps) next to a space heater/box fan/large electric motor of your choice. Periodicaly turn that motor on and off. Instant link loss due to a spike on the line. WARNING, this one could jack up your switch/computer so be sensible.
If you are really green, give your roommate and your computer the same IP.
Take a short ethernet cable and untwist it (take it out of its shielding and untwist the wires). Put it back together in various ways and see how fast/slow your download rates become.
sounds like you built it backwards. you are supposed to build LVM ontop of RAID, that way a single drive blowing out isn't even noticable (if you did RAID1).
If I might add a comment to your last point. IDE drives take a performance hit when you are working with master and slave devices period. This is not a tradeoff of software raid but just a general issue with ide. You can run software raid across master and slave devices just fine, I do right now both at home and on 168 linux boxes where I work, and we hold the service those boxes provide to 5 9's. The only issue I have ever had with software raid has been throughput. You just cant beat a nice fiberchannel enclosure and a massive controller card to get the data rates up, but that is why we put our databases on the SAN and use software raid for the frontends. Now, yes the howto says not to have both of your drives on the same ide channel in case the bus itself freaks out and starts puking bits all over your drives, but how many people have you met or heard of that have lost data because their ide bus died? Not saying it can't happen, just saying that for most of us, this really isn't a huge concern. Besides, we all have backups, right?
I thought about going to such an arrangement with my employer, but it has one huge drawback. When layoff time comes, you are the guy that no one ever sees and therefore no one will ever miss. No matter how much work you do, face time counts for a lot.
not much better I guess :-)
you must be in ashland. My family farm is still out there, just barely though. When I was growing up, it was a town of 300!
You should try chrooting an apache process that runs in User-mode linux. I run all of my servers out of UML now, even samba and my wireless access point. It keeps my server busy, but it always pained me to see it idle anyways.
I use a Neoware neostation 2000. Its a Cyrix 233 chip with an SODIMM and DIMM slot, an IDE header, a PCI slot and sound/nic/video all built in. I net boot mine because I have ethernet strung everywhere, but since their is an IDE header you could easily just pop a drive in there. The unit is totally fanless and has lasted in my garage for some time. Not the fastest thing in the world, but runs linux well, surfs the web and plays mp3's just fine.
I agree, I had no bones with Walmart until I got this reply from them.
...We
never stated or advertised what the processor speed was of the item. The
name of the processor according to ECS is a AMD Athlon 1600+ pro. This
is very similar to that of the AMD AThlon XPM 1600+...
That's when my problem became with Walmart. They respond as if Im some sort of idiot and I'm supposed to thank them from protecting me from the big bad marketing drones on their own site! BTW, they did advertise that unit as an XPM, I kept a copy of the original add. When I sent it to them, they stopped responding to my emails.
Be wary of these walmart laptops. I purchased one, come to find out the CPU was not what I was sold. When I confronted walmart, they told me that they never said what the CPU really was and just because AMD likes to call their chips one thing doesnt mean they have to comply! More at www.jasonandjessi.com/a535.html . Oh, and Im not the only one.
I have a feeling that in those households the computer was looked at much like the TV. A plugin babysitter that keeps junior quiet and out of the way. When used in that manner, yeah the computer can have some negative impacts on your kid. People seem to have forgotten that children need to be stimulated and challenged. TV and the internet can be great tools but can also be pretty mind numbing. My wife and I are about to have our first kid and have been talking about these type of things at length and we both feel very strongly that it is our job to make sure that our son is engaged in things that he finds entertaining but that have more value to them then simply "at least he's quiet". That means we have to actually spend time with our son, in fact, we have to take an interest in his daily life (gasp)! It always shocks me how many parents in our neighborhood either don't know where their kids are and what they are doing or prefer to just sit them down in front of some gizmo instead of getting involved in what they are doing. But hey, we haven't actually had our kid yet, so of course right now I have all the answers and know exactly how it's all gonna work out. Check back in around 10 years.
I just ordered a new laptop for 580 bucks from tiger direct (melt down sell on an acer travelmate) I like it, it's linux friendly and portable. Why bother with a tower anymore?
Gotta agree. I have never had a single problem with linux software raid once I understood how it worked. The maxtor drives, on the other hand, have been nothing but trouble. The issue is componded by the fact that maxtor replaces your busted drive with a remanufactored drive (perhaps all the vendors do, I've never had another vendors drive blow out while still under warranty) and of course, they fail several drives at a time.
Your books always seem to be painstakingly researched. Which comes first, the desire to write the book which creates the need for the research, or the research inspiring you to write the book?
Dont be so sure about that. Drs are required to keep your health records secure because of things like HIPA, but Im not sure about your financial records. I believe that's just a matter of good buisness, but I could be way wrong.
I have never had a single issue with my Epson CX5200, never even had to clean the nozzels and it goes through at least one round of ink every month! I even printed off all of our wedding photos instead of paying for reprints, that was almost 400 5x7 prints! Are you buying the most inexpensive printers and running them hard? Do you have your printer sitting next to a window/TV/Monitor/computer vent where it and the paper will collect more dust then it should? Perhaps your fix will be as simple as just moving your printer to a cleaner/drier spot.
changing a mac is trivial, specially when I can spend 5 minutes listening to your traffic and getting your MAC. Then I just "borrow" it when you are done. MAC filtering is not safe, it will only slow the determined down by the slightest bit.
your neighbors open accesspoint, a copy of Airpwn and a suitably infected jpeg. Sounds like a pretty nasty situation in the making to me.
Snowcrash :-) I wish my Dad was a pizza deliverator hacker who also just happens to be the worlds greatest sword fighter.
I had a very similar issue and my fix ended up being 100% geek.
File Server: Nokia IP330 firewall. Bought it for 50 bucks with a dead harddrive. Just a 1U box with an AMD K6-2 and 64 meg of RAM. This box sucks the most power of all my servers, but I needed the extra umph to run linux software raid.
Firewall: WRT54G with the sveasoft firmware. Works like a charm and even supports 802.1q tagging on the wired side (with a little work)
Mail Server: This is the fun one. NeoStation 3000 X Station. 233mhz Geode processor (30 bucks on ebay), very low power and low noise. Put the board in a case from an Intel iPivot (50 bucks on ebay) and we're good to go
The whole thing is sitting in a rack I made out of 2x4s and powered by a Clary Onguard UPS (50 bucks on ebay). The only real power hog I have is my switch, it's an old Bay (you guessed it, 50 bucks on ebay). This can be done in a real fun, and cheap, way. Just look for used equipment and remember, darn near everything will run linux or NetBSD.