Projects

So, Martin has co-located his poweredge beast into my flat – its noisy with a capital N! But i have got my own 2k3 VM on it so i can practice migrating all the users and data off my old domain controller, although right now, the whole thing has crashed so i’m getting nowhere.

Instead i cleaned the flat and finally took some photos of the setup – check out here If theres any questions about the setup then just ask me. I’ve also stuck up some more pics of the monitoring controller now that it has all its sockets mounted and the toroid bolted in.

I also finally got rid of the annoying buzz in the car when using the car pc (caused by USB hub PSU) by fitting a +5V 3A regulator onto the 12V DC meaning i don’t have to step up to mains and back down again just to get 5V – buzz is now all gone.

I might go out to it for a bit later on today as i want to fit the bluetooth as well as copy across the refined music library – im so sick of AC/DC coming on!

Been a busy few days on the tech front!

I decided to get my head round how subversion (SVN)� and Trac work. They’re both clever beasts – subversion allows multiple contributors to one project (mainly software programming) while maintaining a full revision history – which means you can go back and re-download any version of the software regardless of what modifications occured after that.

The Win GUI is quite good – highlights changed files and so on, also allows you to merge them. Trac is basically an extension to SVN giving a web interface for the entire project allowing plans, documentation and schedules to be inserted. It also allows the allocation of work tickets to individual contributors which means everyone on the project has more of an idea of what they’re supposed to be doing. This is all in preparation for starting at Ledwood on monday (!) as i’ll be using that sort of system there.

Routing wise, i got martins subnet up and running with correct firewall rules, i’ve also discovered i can have subdomains on my public dns meaning that i can now have www.drz.lewty.org.uk. This is in addition to the fact ive finally found out how to do root proxy vhosts – ie my mce.lewty.org.uk now fully points to my mediacentre pc, with the web based login to the guide – allowing me to set it to record no matter where i am.

The iptables rules are getting lengthy to say the least, and ive just remembered what i had planned to do today – go to B&Q to get a bolt to fasten the toroid in my monitoring controller into the case! I’ll pop off and do that now then, TTFN.

It’s been full speed ahead on the monitoring controller this week, been fitting all of the nice Neutrik sockets in. I did have to buy a new hole saw as mine old one could take no more punishment unfortunatly. To fit the pots on the front of the unit i need a 10mm HSS drill bit – B&Q wanted over ?8 for one! I got straight onto ebay and paid ?1.50 including postage.

In the future i’ll order from screwfix when i can – they’re far cheaper than B&Q and Wickes don’t seem to sell anything that i want. Once the sockets and controls are installed i’ll get on with the circuity, some of which may have to wait until funds are available for more supplies.

I took a trip round to Ledwood Tech today to say hello and go through what they do and what i’ll be involved with. It looks like it’ll be a fun year, or at least i hope it will be. I start on monday so will check in then with an update, though i may well be starting a private ledwood blog, only available to me and my tutor as part of my placement work.

Anyways, i’ll get going, cheerio for now.

I’ve been doing some clever logon VB scripting today, now i have a logon script attached to my Active Directory user which, when logging in, checks as to what my IP is then pops up a box telling me where i am according to the IP range (ie. Home, Wirral, elsewhere) and then if i am on the wirral it mounts all the network shares from the mediacentre.

Eventually i’ll be having it so that it mounts the printer local to my location and my documents/fileserver shares as relevent.

I also need to get OpenVPN as a service on my laptop so that it will connect before logon allowing me to continue to use the shares, although that will give a local to home IP, meaning i’ll have to do something clever.

Yup, just got the water bill – ?380, although that is per year, its still quite a lot – around ?32/month. The electric isn’t working out too bad – roughly 10-11 units per day im using at the mo, and given that im off work, and everything is on all day, thats pretty good.

Me, Martin and Paula went to see Oceans 13 last night, and while it was better than Oceans 12, its still not a patch on the first one in that trilogy – Oceans 11. The cinema was all the way out at Chesire Oaks, which seems to have a lot of shops and resteurants about and should be investigated further.

Tech-wise, im stuck, anything i want to do seems to involve money, so it’ll have to wait, either until i start getting paid or until my bank stop being so silly and extend my overdraft.

Anyways, thats it for now

The fans in my two good, big 3Com switches are failing and making an absolute racket!

This comes just as i add in a third subnet to my local setup – DMZ. My firewall now has 4 network cards – public, private, DMZ and DRZ (more on that later).

The DMZ is a super locked down subnet as it has the wireless access point on it, everything on that domain is called hostname.dmz.lewty.org.uk, it at the moment has access anywhere ports 80 and 53. I need to change this so that 53 can only be to my DNS server, otherwise i will be having people tunneling out of it.

DRZ is for Martin, if he does decide to colo his poweredge at my place, i’ll have the infrastructure in place to manage it – lock it down to essential services, port forwards and whatnot.

No future is expansion is possible in this setup now – i’ve run out of PCI slots on the firewall, i do need to get one or two quad port 10/100 cards for the future though, as since this entire system is planned to go 1U i’ll only have one or two PCI slots to play with.

And so i’m back in the Wirral, which really, to be honest, is better than being at home, although i have no company as Martin is away in Cornwall until next weekend.

On the other hand i have been able to get loads of stuff done, read on…

DIY Projector: I set it up and yes it does work, but… The image isn’t really very bright due to the distance – if i could move it closer then it would be better. I also got the same problem every projector gets – unless you mount it from the ceiling it gets in the way and it’s difficult to position the furniture. However, i was watching CSI on an 8 foot diagonal screen. It would also be better be using a white screen instead of a cream wall.

Gigabit Upgrade: Finally got gigabit going on my LAN, the original Desktop GT Pro1000 i bought was fine in my desktop, then the other desktop one i bought was being funny in my mediacentre, it turns out it didn’t like the pci slot i had it in, so now that card and the PCI-X server adaptor work fine. At the moment theres only the desktop and mediacentre which have gigabit, eventually the 2k3 server and fileserver will have it too. That’s if the switch lasts…it was doing funny things last night – the first 4 ports wouldn’t link at all! But so far so good, i’ll eventually upgrade to a rackmount switch.

I’ve been giving the upgrade paths a bit more thought and it seems like a good plan to be getting 2nd hand servers – dell or IBM, or even some Intel ones are coming in at the right price. The fileserver is going to be the most expensive due to having to buy the case and backplane. The PDFs of the initial rack and network layouts are on the computer systems page, though these have already changed. Getting a rack is quite hard, doubly so for a reasonably sized one.

Other plans for upgrades involve monitors – i plan to only have the two dell 17″ and one 20″ widescreen to make it nice, neat and tidy. Would quite like a 30″ LCD tv but don’t we all….

Still settling in to the new place, it’ll take a while theres all sorts of little bits and bobs that need sorting – quite a few meaning cost – which i certainly can’t do until i start getting paid which who knows when will be.

Well i’ll run now, feel free to drop by anytime (those of you priveledged enough will have my address).

I’m sat here, quite bored and very tired. I’ve decided not to bother going into work tomorrow, i don’t see the point seeing as how i have little to nothing to do – there are better things i can be doing at home, or at least ones which involve more sleep and less tiredness.

Also given is the Galloping Horse pub quiz tomorrow night, it’ll be the first time in over a year i’ve been able to go without having work the next day, not that we’ll win it or anything.

Going to head back to the Wirral soon, probably friday at this rate, maybe push it to Sunday afternoon, i want to get my projector on the go and get everything else sorted – got pretty much a full car load to take back down including my hifi and all sorts.

I’ll be glad when i can start work in a real job, with my own desk and whatnot, i hate invasion of space at the best of times, some things to me just have to remain mine and if i cant do things my way it really does get annoying.

I also want to get stuck back into my monitoring controller – and car pc come to that – ive got lots of bits for both to get cracking on with, primary for the car is the 3A regulators that need to be installed.

Oh, i found a rather nice new band/artist today, “Pink Martini” it’s rather good jazz/smooth/latin type, the song Hey Eugene! is currently on the Smooth Radio playlist, although i can’t get smooth round here and my preset has been written over with Radio One (ok, i admit, i actually find Chris Moyles quite funny in the morning on my way to work, but thats pretty much the only time i’d ever listen).

Yup, thats right, it would seem i have a shortage of IEC leads, i must buy a bulk lot – the theory being that if i have two for every device i own i’ll never run out….i hope.

I’ve been speccing together new servers and whatnot, primarily for my NAS which will run on the lovely Solaris with ZFS and Z-RAID, i found this case linky Ok, so it’s ?600 but it’s 16 SATA-II hotswap bays, with the correct backplane, add that to using ZFS, this means i could keep a monthly disk expenditure, and although disks will get cheaper, i can just get bigger disks as they dont all have to be the same size, right now a 500Gb Seagate SATA-II disk will set you back a mere ?67 which is a bargain. 16x 500Gb….umm….8Tb (think that will be enough?) although its Z-RAID so its approximatly equivalent to RAID-5 costing leaving me with 6Tb or so – using all 500Gb disks, as time goes on the 750Gb and 1Tb disks will be the same price…

One of the problems with this arrangement is SATA connections, SCAN do a Solaris compatible SATA card – 8 ports, but it’s PCI-X which means either butchering an already existing server (but has to have a standard ATX or Extended ATX mainboard and PSU) or buying new – PCI-X mainboards are more than a little expensive, so i need to investigate what second hand servers will have them, or looking to buying on ebay.

The box itself doesnt really need to be all that powerful – 1Ghz, 1Gb RAM or so would be fine, it’s finding somthing suitable which is the hard part, and, i might as well do this properly.

In the meantime i have decomissioned the current fileserver, as having only a single 160Gb drive, seemed pretty pointless, i will put this into the mediacentre for the time being, at least then all the media will be in one place, even if its not accessable 24/7. I did try to install Solaris onto the old fileserver but it was having none of it, it is waay underspec really so i didnt expect much.

I’m off back to Fellside tomorrow, the list of jobs to do is ever increasing (this is on top of the original job i was going in to do) but if i can get a couple of weeks (maybe weekends) in i’ll be happy and it’ll all go towards paying bills and whatnot.

I would like to get back – i want to give my DIY projector a whirl, but i guess it’ll just have to wait.