I moved PostgreSQL on the home server gosper from an install I compiled myself ages ago to the debian-maintained package. As a side-effect the data moved from /scratch to /var which is on a different physical disk. Now the disk with /scratch and /boot has no reason to stay awake all the time and it spins down, saving another bit of power. Quite visible in the UPS stats. I guess splitting OS and lesser-used data disks in a home server can save a bit of power. The assorted sensors at home overview shows disk hda sleeping a lot more.
As a side effect the postgresql data is now also included in the backups. The database at home went from a few tables with copies of data from webprojects I was developing to data actually in use. Time for backups.
2008-06-01 (#)
I decided to do the long overdue upgrade from Debian oldstable to stable on the home machine turing. Unlike earlier debian sarge -> etch upgrades even the XFree86 to Xorg upgrade went completely flawless. So I tried some more upgrading and went from a Linux 2.4.35.4 to a Linux 2.6.25.4 kernel. With some rounds of kernel recompiling I got everything working again, including complete acpi support which I never got working with 2.4 kernels. Somewhere around 2.4.32 acpi support just gave lots of kernel events (while this motherboard was still running the home server gosper. Later 2.4 versions just told me the bios was too old for proper acpi support. It's an Asus P3B-F motherboard and google searches indicated that the overload of events is just a known bug. Upgrading the bios did not help and made another problem appear: a shutdown turned into a reboot so I downgraded it again to the version with working shutdown.This was the first mainboard I bought (in 1999) with working acpi which I once used to scare Henk van de Kamer by just pressing the power button of the pc. Back then you carefully shut down the machine and acpid was brand new. So I'm happy acpi and everything is working again and this is a good reason to put more time into 2.6 kernels and try to get that working on all machines at home.
With 2.6 I ran into a few things I already saw on building it for the wardrivingbox such as the speaker driver being separated (it gets very quiet without it). New to me was that /etc/modules.conf generated by update-modules from modutils is not actually used with 2.6 kernels. The 2.6 version uses files in /etc/modprobe.d/. Copying settings for modules to that directory suddenly made drivers like bttv work again. I also had to give specific settings for the soundblaster card which was autodetected in 2.4. It is an ISA card, so back to good old io=0x220 irq=7 dma=1.
The remaining issue is that the network card does not stay on for wake on lan.
2008-01-07 (#)
Yesterday I found some time to install the new 1-wire sensors in a place where I am interested in the temperatures: the attic where the home server gosper lives and started fetching data into rrdtool databases. The assorted sensors at home page now shows some of the available temperatures. Sensor 2 lies in the open area right below the top of the roof.
2008-01-03 (#)
athcool is .. cool! The new server mainboard was consuming some more power and was at a higher temperature. I looked for ways to reduce this a bit. Setting power throttling mode to T1 did not help for power use or temperature (but the system reacted slowish), but athcool made the readouts from lm_sensors change from CPU Temp: +42.8 C to CPU Temp: +21.5 C which looks a lot better. And, more important: the UPS reports a drop in power-use, which is good for the electricity bill. Follow the graphs at my assorted sensors at home.
Update: the chance of instability mentioned in the documentation happened to me so athcool is disabled again on the server.
2008-01-02 (#)
Happy new year! I used the christmas period to do an upgrade I have been planning for a while: change the mainboard of the home server gosper to a newer (better: less older) one. A few hours of screwing worked: it now is an AMD Athlon 1400. Everything works after a few bits of tweaking, including updated mainboard temperature sensors.
2007-12-21 (#)
Some environment sensors at home are now public. Started with the environment sensors of the home server gosper which are the easiest. Other stuff will be added if and when certain monitoring projects go from being a wild idea to delivering real data. Ok, I did order some temperature sensors and a 1-wire controller from Hobby Boards 1-wire solutions.
2007-12-20 (#)
At work I "took over" a fourfold temperature sensor, Quozl's Temperature Sensor. It got me interested in the 1-wire system for sensors. Applications like Thermd and DigiTemp make it possible to log all kinds of environmental data easily. I'm seriously considering getting a simple 1-wire interface for the server at home so I can monitor several inside temperatures (the cheapest to monitor and the most interesting to me) by just stringing some cheap phone wires and hook up sensors. Yet another network, although this one would be simpler to maintain.
2007-10-12 (#)
Even geleden alweer xs4all-only aangevraagd. Bijna als Xs4all + ADSL van KPN (voorheen mxstream) maar dan heb je als klant alleen maar te maken met Xs4all (en er zitten organisatorisch/technisch in het netwerk ook verschillen). Vandaag viel de verbinding weg en was blijkbaar de omzetting (dat had ik wel even vantevoren willen weten, maargoed). Alleen zat ik natuurlijk op dat moment aan de verkeerde kant van de netwerkverbinding om even de instellingen te wijzigen thuis. Omdat ik JP's SIP_SPOOF gebruik moest ik het IP ook 'even' thuis instellen, zowel in de server thuis als in het adsl modem (Speedtouch 546i). De commando's in de Speedtouch: :env set var=PPP_ip value=NIEUW_IP (ergens gebruikt SIP_SPOOF dat), :ip rtdelete dst=OUD_IP/32 intf=eth0, :ip rtadd dst=NIEUW_IP/32 intf=eth0. Natuurlijk ook /etc/network/interfaces aanpassen. Tijdelijk even IP 10.0.0.150 gebruiken voorkomt dat je er uitgegooid wordt bij het omzetten van de routing.
2007-08-29 (#)
Weird tidbit in the home server: disk /dev/hdc, a WDC WD3200AAJB will not go to standby mode on the timer. With hdparm -S 59 /dev/hdc no standby mode happens, while I am sure nothing accesses the drive (unmounting all partitions and stopping smartmontools). When I force it to standby with hdparm -y /dev/hdc it will stay in standby mode until the partition is accessed again.
2007-06-26 (#)
Heaps of kernel messages on the home server ndisc_send_redirect: not a neighbour which is ipv6 related. I did a google search for it which found a bit by Jonathan McDowell mentioning ndisc_send_redirect: not a neighbour but the real solution for me was in the comments. Somewhere eth0 of the server had lost its IPv6 address. Doing ifdown eth0; ifup eth0 made the correct ipv6 address reappear and now the messages seem to have stopped.
2007-06-12 (#)
At completely the wrong moment, another disk in my home server went bad. It first showed as loads and loads of ide errors. I had no time to deal with it, so I just left it spewing errors. Which made the problem go away for the biggest part. Eventually I got around to buying a new disk, a cheap 320 Gig disk. I wanted to set up /scratch new, without reiserfs and started to move data to a new scratch volume. This went well until I wanted to shrink the logical volume: the whole volume set became corrupted. I was still able to access my data, so I borrowed some diskspace, reused some other disks and copied everything to another machine using rsync. After I rebooted the server, the volume groups were indeed gone, and I switched to 'old-fashioned' partitions and spend quite some time dividing the loads of data on the new partitions. All is back to normal now, but without lvm or reiserfs.
2007-04-18 (#)
Making the new disk bootable was the quite hard part: the floppy drive of the server turned out to be completely broken, not reading/writing disks. A scsi cd/dvd drive I added could make the machine boot from CD, but took ages to read the rescue cd, sounding like it had serious reading problems. So I used an ide cd-rom drive (but I had to disconnect one of the ide harddisks first to be able to use this), which the machine did see, and used that to make the whole system bootable again. It took a while of working, but I have a working server again.
2007-04-17 (#)
I bought a new 400G disk at MyCom yesterday. I thought I had to setup the logical volumes all over again because the total size would grow above 1T but that maximum size is the maximum size of one logical volume. So just moving the /scratch volume off the suspect disk and on the new disk was an easy operation using the lvm howto part on removing an old disk. Now to change disks so I can boot from that new disk .. and making it bootable first.
2007-04-15 (#)
Friday the homeserver developed a problem in one sector of /dev/hda, a Maxtor disk that's been in there since September 2003. The sector was in the bitmap of a reiser filesystem (via lvm) that did not want to mount for this reason. I started a complete reiserfsck on it as a last resort to get that sector rewritten. After 39 hours the complete filesystem check was done, that sector rewritten (and at that time remapped by the drive). The /scratch volume is available again, but I'll buy a new disk for it anyway, to avoid going through this several times.
2007-04-08 (#)
This afternoon, I browsed the e-mail and saw a mail "Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 updated" and thought "I should do that upgrade of the home server gosper to the current stable anyway, let's start it now". So I did, worked out all the problems associated with the upgrade (sendmail only broke a tiny bit, inn2 needed major whacking before it was running again, the usual). Right after I finished the upgrade and started looking whether mail was flowing, I saw the mail "Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released" .. that previous mail only mentioned "upcoming release".
2007-03-19 (#)
I rescued a dds-3 tapedrive from a server at work that was being thrown out, and added it to the home server gosper. I did a bit of reading first whether amanda would support two tape drives as a virtual changer and indeed it does. Configured it after reading the docs, and did a test run. It just works, and I really like this in open source software. This will save me on runs to the attic where the server lives. I updated the Building - and maintaining - a new home server with this bit and did a general cleanup of the timeline (for as far as I could remember stuff... I still have no idea when I did the memory upgrades).
2006-07-03 (#)
I decided to do something about the high temperatures in my home server today. Seems the last few days (temperatures around 30 celcius) the disks and cpu got quite hot. I bought a Coolermaster TLF-S12 at MyCom. They had no boring normal black 12 centimeter fans in stock, just ones with blue or red leds. I'm no casemodder (brrr!) so I'm not too happy about the blue leds, there is now a blue glow behind the server. I put an 8 centimeter fan in the front of the case to suck more air in. And I redid the thermal paste on the CPU. The new cooling does cool the harddisks a bit better but the cpu still shoots up to 80 degrees celcius (yes, way too hot!) on high load. I guess I need to look at the nest of IDE cables it does live in. Some other time, it's way too hot up in the attic.
2006-02-12 (#)
After too regular filesystem-related problems with the homeserver, I replaced 3 SCSI disks with 1 IDE disk this weekend. Power consumption down on the entire system, cpu usage up on heavy filesystem access. I still get a weird error about unmounting /usr on shutdown, but I found the reason (ldap shared libraries always in use) and I circumvented the problem (also remounting /usr read-only). It took a number of hours of work in total: several hours syncing the old filesystems to the new, and after that several tries to get the system running with all hardware detected and working (there are still a lot of cables in there, and some get unplugged easily on opening and closing the tower case).
2005-12-16 (#)
Updated the home server page a bit with the latest bits of history (well, a few years of backlog to be precise). It will be updated soonish as I want /home on newer disks *and* I'd like to move away from reiserfs.
2005-04-26 (#)
Got vboxgetty running on my home server so it plays digital answering machine. It took a bit of fiddling to find the right settings and the right way to program the correct number to answer on.
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