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.

I finally set something new up for my computer network. Recently, I thought about the idea of trying out VMWare Server 2 since it is free and all and it’s easy to run. How it works is that you have to have a machine with either Windows or Linux in either X86 or X86_64. All you do is run the installer and after you configure it, you log into the web interface to control everything vmware wise. It works amazing and it is easy to figure out. If you want to try it, sign up and download from here “VMWare Server”.

So for my server, I built a system from my old AMD 64 machine and installed Ubuntu 8.04.1 x64 on it. The hardware I used for this project was:

• Board: BioStar T-Force SLI
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 +3500
• Memory: 2 Gig DDR400
• Hard Drives:
  1. Seagate 20Gib IDE – OS
  2. Seagate 120Gib SATA – RAID Drive 1
  3. Seagate 120Gib SATA – RAID Drive 2
  4. Hitachi 250Gib SATA – Extra Storage (Not used yet)
  5. Hitachi 500Gib SATA – Soon to be RAID array with another 500Gib
• Case: Antec Sonata 1st Rev with 380w PSU
• Network:
  1. No name brand PCI Realtek 8169 Gigabit card
  2. Zonet Realtek 8169 Gigabit card (File server)
• Video: EVGA MX4000 PCI card

I have the two RAID drives in RAID 1 using MDADM and it works perfect. The 250Gib drive is empty but it is there just in case I need more storage. Also, I am in the process of setting up another RAID 1 array that will hold my servers files on it using two 500Gib drives from my new Drobo box (I’ll explain in a bit). What that means is that I am going to be moving my main ITX server into a virtual machine to run on my VMware server but using it exactly as it is setup right now so I won’t have to start all over again setting it up. On the plus side I get to use my ITX server as a small machine for my living room. Mostly so there is a computer for my mom to use to work on school work in the living room instead of her desk which is quite small. Another plus is the fact I will be gaining more space on the server since it will have the new RAID array.

Next up I have a new file storage device called a Drobo. They call it a storage robot that essentially is a non-RAID RAID array. They have their own system called BeyondRAID which is RAID like but not true RAID. How it works is place any size drives you have in it. From them it will completely build a new drive from all the drives. No need to match size and brand, it just builds it into an array. When you run out of space on it, you just pop a drive out and install a new one. It will automaticly set-up the drive and rebuild the array. So far I love it, even though it is quite on the expensive side hovering around $450. As of yesterday (1/25/09) it now has 2x 1.5tb and 2x 500gib drives totalling 2.3tb and it is fully backed up.

Now car news. I am still modifying my car. Now it now has a BORA and euro 1.8T emblems, German plate with replica registration sticker, and it will soon have black euro VW emblems. Also I ordered and received the matching German “HN F1744″ plate for when I finally have the money to get a genuine VW BORA trunk lid with the wide plate opening. For now it is going to be chillin on my desk waiting for the day to be mounted.

Well that’s it for now. Finally I get to post this post. Hope your happy and if you have any questions on how to do any of this or about something else, just sign up and post a comment.