Nothing unusual. So, I finally got around to building and setting up my new ITX Linux server. I got the board last Monday and started the setup that night.

Step 1:

First problem I ran into was the board mounting into my server case. It turns out that since it uses laptop memory and the 2nd card slot is on the underside of the board, it does not want to mount fully to the cases actual mounts. At first I did not think of this and just drilled all four screws down. This caused a small problem when I went to start it up for the first time. Nothing, that was all I got at first. thinking I plugged in a cable the wrong way or like my PCI riser card isn’t compatible. No, turns out that it was the screws holding down the front of the board to the case. This means that it is not actually fully mounted and only attached by two screws. But anyway, I got everything mounted and connected and up an running.

Step 2:

Here is the fun part. So when I try to get Ubuntu 8.04.2 Server installed, I ran into a few problems. First off, I could not get partman to build my RAID array right. How I wanted it was to setup two RAID arrays using mdadm (Linux software RAID) with one array as 10GB for the OS and programs and the rest of the of the drive as another RAID array. So I setup partitions on each disc with two 10GB bootable Linux Auto RAID type and something like 290GB for the 2nd RAID for the data storage but as soon as I went into the option to setup the actual RAID devices, it ended up taking the whole drive over for itself and destroyed everything I setup. For a whole day I worked on that and lucky for me, I ended up just doing it manually. What is nice about the Ubuntu setup is that you still have a root console during the setup. This saved my ass during this setup.

What I had to do was hit Ctrl + Alt + F2 to get into the console. From there I ran fdisk -l to list all the available drives and partitions so I can manually add them. I won’t get into the specifics of everything I did with fdisk but I will tell you that I ended up with four total partitions. Than next was the actual RAID building. The next command I ran was:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

This built my RAID 1 array for my root drive. Now that this was done, all I needed to do was go back into partman in the setup and, what do you know, the device /dev/md0 appeared and the correct size. All I did than was partition that as a root device and went on with the setup. The rest of the install went exactly as planed. So at least that is all setup now.

Step 3:

Now was the really fun part. My Drobo. I got a Firewire 800 card for the server to utilize the speeds of Firewire over USB. Well it seems that was a lost cause. It didn’t want to read anything over 2TB which I had my Drobo setup with a LUN size of 8TB because of expansion. I ran dmesg to find an error with, well I don’t remember exactly the error but I’ll have to try it later and post it on here. After fighting with that for a few hours, I ended up switching to USB. Started the format and I never thought formatting an 8TB volume would take so long but what did I know? After that, I started copying all 1.2TB of data back from my other external drive to the Drobo. Let that run overnight and though the next day since it is 1.2TB of data. After the copy was finally finished, it started giving me read errors. I unmounted it and tried to remount, <code>Wrong fs type</code> error came up. Crap, I hosed my file system and let’s just say I am lucky I did not format the other external.

At this point I was getting frustrated. Looking all over the internet doesn’t give much info on using a Drobo under Linux with ext3. I don’t remember what site or I would give him credit but he said something about it only being able to support a 2TB LUN size. Not exactly what I wanted to do but at this point after 3 days of formatting and partitioning, I said “why not. If it is going to work, Ill have to deal”. So that is exactly what I did. It turns out that was the trick. For some stupid reason, the Drobo does not want to let ext3 format over 2TB. What sucks about the 2TB LUNs is that now it shows up as two 2TB drives, since I have 3.1TB worth of drives in it right now. I know its not working because of after I copped everything back to the Drobo, all the data is still readable. Now if only I could work up the courage to erase all the data off the 1.5TB backup external and place that in the Drobo. 4.5TB, here I come.

Step 4:

All I did after that huge fiasco with the data on the external drives and such, was install all my programs and setup them up. I have VMWare Server 2 installed running my VPN server, APCUPSD for my UPS, Samba for windows shares, hddtemp to monitor the temperatures of my hard drives (internal), smartmontools to monitor smart, and drobo-util to manage my Drobo. All of these programs are free which is why I mainly use Linux.

So thats my short but sweet story about my new server setup. Soon, if I ever remember to do it, is take pictures and add redo my ITX server info page located at My Server Page.