Howto's, experiences and more

Well, I have been away for quite a while and a lot has happened since then. But it is time to start this blog up again to share knowledge and experience with you people out there.

The first thing i need to share my thoughts about is actually the crash of one of my servers.

The machine was running a native installation of RedHat, but it was a bit old already and it desperately needed replacement. So, up to a point, the raid controller decided to go bonkers and crash my server several times until i figured out that it was actually the controller at fault instead of the disks. And that is when you are actually facing a complete reinstall of your system.

Now to make lemonade from the lemons i got, I decided to go fancy and actually make it a virtual server implementation.

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If you started reading from this page, you might want to visit the introduction article first.

Now that we have built a PC from our components and closed it so that we can power it up, we are ready to install an OS on it. Well… Almost ready. Since we do not have a CDROM installed into the NAS, we need to figure out a way how to get the OS onto our PC so that we can create a NAS out of it. Of course you need a temporary monitor, keyboard and mouse for it to get Linux installed so hook those up too. If you do have a CDROM in it you can of course skip the whole USB key process.

The way I did it was take a USB memory stick of at least 1GB, and turn that into a bootable drive containing a linux server edition. As I stated in the previous article, I chose for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Server Edition. Some may argue that for stability i better choose the 8.04-2 LTS Hardy Heron Server Edition and in my defense I can say that I actually tried that, but it would not install from the stick, so I had to choose for 8.10 since that one worked flawlessly. The reason why 8.04 wouldn’t install will be explained later on.

First we need to build ourselves a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu 8.10 installation media on it. The way I did it was just use the Create Bootable USB Stick on my laptop with Ubuntu 8.10 on it and using the Server Edition ISO. It all went by itself. However, i will assume you will not have linux or not the 8.10 version of Ubuntu, and thus do not have access to this neato tool. We will tackle that with unetbootin ! Read more

This is the first part of a series of articles I will write about building my own brand-new home server that initially started out as a home-brew NAS.

Something entirely different this time, i know. Recently I felt the need to have ’secure’, easy accessible and reliable storage capacity for my data. In the past I have used mobile drives, 2,5Inch laptop drives in a case with a USB interface. While that worked just fine in the ’secure’ and ‘easy accessible’ area, it is of course not really reliable. In practice you tend to lug those things around with you, bumping them and occasionally accidentally dropping them.

A week ago i connected my 500GB portable drive containing my business data to my laptop at home, and went to get a cuppa, hooking my finger behind the USB cable and pulling the thing off the table, resulting into a nasty drop where my only luck was that the USB cable was quite short and did not reach the ground. As you can imagine, the drive started it’s gravity induced journey and right before it hit the ground, there was no more USB cable left and the drive went into a nasty spin slightly upwards while disconnecting from the USB cable, to finally land flat on it’s vibration absorbing pads on the bottom.

This time, I really lucked out. The drive and the data did not sustain any damage from the sudden disconnect and drop to the floor. (Actually it isn’t the falling that is a problem, it’s the sudden stop)

That is when i decided that I had to have a NAS. For those among you that need a reminder on what NAS meant and those that have no clue what a NAS is : NAS stands for Network Attached Storage.

Having looked around, I found out that ready-made NAS boxes are immensely expensive (600+) and lack flexibility. (ie you buy a NAS and that is all you are going to get) So I decided to build my own.

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After tinkering and toying with this Ventrilo program for over a week (and complaining why people dont just use TeamSpeak for pity sake ! It has a native Linux client, come on.) I finally managed to get the thing working on Ubuntu 8.04 with standard ALSA etc.

First thing you need to do, is make sure everything works with the sound system. That means, speakers are configured right, but also confirming that the (built-in if you use a laptop) microphone works as well.

To get this done, you might have to take a look at this page, but obviously i will not cover getting your sound cards to work on every system possible. This entry is about getting Ventrilo to work, and hopefully a comprehensive guide at that. This also means that this guide assumes that you have Wine installed and properly working ! If you haven’t done that yet, get it done first.

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As a reader of this blog has pointed out to me (I have readers, i’m shocked !) there has been changes in the VMWare installation files and simply converting an RPM to DEB is not going to cut it anymore.

VMWare has chosen a new path however, and one that is much much easier too. It’s VMWare’s newest bundle of joy : The bundle installation file. (sorry about the pun, really)

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