This has indeed been kind of a long week. A long week that some how seemed to go by quickly. Maybe those two things contradict each other but it still seems some how right.
I think I’m finally starting to get a handle on some of the official things I will be doing at my job for real. I mean I learned how to fill out all the paper work for actually “kicking” a new storage server, so that was fun. I am still doing a lot of wiring in racks. I have to say, for an job in the “technology” field I certainly seem to be doing a lot of lifting and screwing and running wires around this way and that. Doesn’t seem very technology, doesn’t seem very technology at all.
I did find a booklet with the “Intel Xeon Inside” emblem on it which I affixed to my Thinkpad T60. That at least got a chuckle out of my team lead. See, that’s the sort of thing you find most amusing as a “data center monkey” – the idea of a Xeon inside your T60. To data center monkeys that’s fucking hilarious.
I did finally declare the Windows XP install for my land lady I had only been working on for two weeks officially completed and gave her the computer along with my unused LCD monitor. She seems quite happy with it which considering what it replaced (an original Celeron Dell with 256 megs of memory) she should be quite happy with the difference. I think the one I gave her was an AMD 3200+ with onboard memory and either 1 or 2 gigs of memory I can’t remember running XP. So Ya, a little faster.
I know I already obsessed with over this one several posts but I’m going to think about it again. But this time I think I’m going to “just do it” and I feel a lot more like I can just do it since I am done with the land lady’s computer.
And that’s the whole virtual WHS thing with data split up in to a bunch of virtual disks across several physical disks. All virtual disks of course mirrored to some of purchased or pre-packaged NAS device/PC. I can’t really afford a real FreeNAS device anyway.
So that Celeron with the 256 megs I mentioned? I think it’s the perfect teeny size for a NAS. Only problem is there isn’t really any room inside for hard drives. So I was going to do some surgery on an old backplane of mine that wasn’t working quite well then modify the case to fit the back plane. I don’t know how well or if at all that would actually work… I mean it would be a lot of surgery to the chassis itself. Not to mention this backplane would be going right where minor little things like the on/off switch currently are. Oh and being an old Celeron of course it doesn’t have SATA ports. Why would it have something useful like that? Nor does the PSU have SATA power of course. That can be easily solved with adapters though. So there’s that. I do have an old SATA RAID PCI card I could use. That would make spinrite a little more complicated to run though. As I would have to take the drives out, connect them to a different PC, run spinrite on them for however long that takes and then put them back in. Probably in the right order. I suppose it’s doable though assuming I could find the RAID card.
So it’s the perfect size and shape I’m just not sure how practical it would be. One alternative would be to do the chassis surgery and stick a different motherboard in there. An ITX or atom board or whatever. It is after all just supposed to be a NAS. Nothing fancy. I mean it doesn’t actually need all that much power in the processor I don’t think. It’s just going to sit there and make some drives available.
So once that is all set up I would set up some kind of sync up system, possibly using RSYNC, there by having a mirror of all my data.
On actual server hosting the virtual WHS would be virtual box of course. I wanted to setup phpvirtualbox on it so I could have the server in a headless state.
….later
I just re-evaluated the old celeron box for like the 7th time probably in the past several weeks and reached the same conclusion: it’s not really of much use, period. No integrated NIC means a cheap PCI NIC. And apparently that means no form of PXE boot option. Also no USB drive boot option at all. I even checked Dell’s web site and there’s no BIOS update, just that original that it shipped with. So this celeron board is for intents and purposes completely useless. Unless I’m missing? I mean for a while there I thought hey it’s old maybe there’s a chance it would boot from an internal zip drive. Some how I doubt it. And even if it could…would be able to anything else I wanted? No, I don’t think so. I’ll have to find a cheap Atom board or other ITX or something like that. Too bad I suppose. Would have been nice to use it without spending too much on it. There’s still the issue of fitting all those sata drives into it, figure out fan mountings and whatever else anyway.
I seem to b more obsessed with this hypothetical NAS box than I am with the actual server that will be primarily holding all my data. But I guess there’s not much left to talk about with that. I’ll be buying a new motherboard I think with a new CPU and new memory. Most likely several gigs worth for the memory. The CPU has to be at least new enough it has that VM extension of course. And cheap, very cheap. So probably an AMD since they seem to be so cheap these days.
I wanted to boot off of some minimal host which would thereby not take up a lot of resources thus the guest OS would have that much more. I was leaning toward FreeNAS than towards some minimal Linux like DSL and now after some frustration of finding the right Linux I might end up right back where I started with FreeNAS. I haven’t decided yet.
The thing I like most about this VirtualBox solution is that I can shift around the host OS as well as the host’s hardware. I can use any hardware I want really and just about any host OS I can think of. And my server is just sitting there happily running. I’m sure the performance would vary depending on memory and CPU resources but at least the guest OS wouldn’t know the difference. This to me is the big advantage over VMWare/VirtualPC or the Citrix Xen/Linux kernel VM stuff: If the motherboard dies it’s okay. If the host OS crashes for some reason it’s okay. Because the data is backed up and I can use any host I want to boot the virtual server.
Also, VirtualPC only supports three virtual hard drives at a max capacity of 160 gigs each whilst VirtualBox supports terabyte+ capacities and I lost count on how many drives of any type you can specify such as IDE, SATA or SCSI. So to say VirtualPC is inferior feels like an understatement. And well I do have some kind of virtual machine server type of deal, the 2005 edition, from my MSDN subscription. And actually the version of server 2008 and is supposed to only do that as well. In fact it just boots up into Windows environment but only pops up a command shell. And I didn’t really get much past that point. I know the command shell pretty well but it’s not like there’s a wget utility in Windows or something. I mean how are you supposed to do anything with it to set it up or whatever? Obviously I was missing something.
So as as I was saying boot up DSL or FreeNAS or whatever which auto-loads and boots my virtual WHS. There’s my server and all my data waiting for me. The data backed up to a hypothetical NAS box also on the network. That’s about as I’ve gotten so far. That’s one thing I think I’m planning for tomorrow. To at least attempt to start this. I mean even if it’s XP has a host with nothing but VirtualBox running on it. Who cares, I just want to be able to look like I’ve actually gone beyond the obsessively thinking about it stage to the might-actually-be-doing stage. Okay I’m going to bed.