d-link

A home Linux server? $1200?

Dave Farquhar Linux , , ,

ExtremeTech has an article about building a home Linux server. They’re recommending high-end P4s for the task. And I say, get real.
If what you want is a simple file/print server, anything that’ll take a 100-megabit NIC and has room for some good-sized hard drives will do great. You want a machine that’s running its PCI bus at 33 MHz, so a Pentium-133 is a better server than a Pentium-120, or, believe it or not, a Pentium-150. If the machine is marginal, get something other than an $8 D-Link 10/100 card or another card with the RealTek 8139 chipset. A pricier 3Com or Intel card will conserve CPU cycles for you.

Remember, too, that Linux doesn’t use the BIOS, so if a machine refuses to recognize that 200-gig hard drive you just bought, set the drive type to “none” in the BIOS and keep another, smaller drive in the system to boot from. Linux will pick up the monster drive and use it.

SCSI is much better for servers than IDE, but when two or three people (or one person) will be using it, the only advantage SCSI really offers is being better-built.

And the video recommendations in the article are absolutely ridiculous. You don’t need a GeForce 4MX 420. Dig around in your parts closet and find that 1-meg PCI video card you bought back in 1995 and haven’t used in five years. We’re talking a system that’s going to be using text mode. Or buy the very cheapest OEM AGP video card you can find to save a PCI slot for something useful–last time I looked, Newegg.com had a cheap AGP card based on an old ATI chipset for 18 bucks.

So don’t listen to those guys. If you want to build a Linux server and all you’ve got to work with is a Pentium-100, go for it. It won’t perform like their aging 1.13 GHz P3 (the slower machine in their benchmarks) but for a home network, it’s plenty. Keep in mind this Website is running off a P2-450. I’ve watched it under heavy traffic. There are two bottlenecks when it’s serving files to someone on broadband: My DSL connection, and the Web browser on the other side. The only time I’ve ever seen CPU usage on this box top 50% for more than a few seconds is when someone loads that giant GPS thread (the post with more than 200 comments).

Just be aware that some Linux distros aren’t too wild about older BIOSes. I’ve got a P133 that won’t boot the Mandrake 7.2 CD (yeah, it’s old–that’s how long it’s been since I used Mandrake) or the Debian 3.0 CD, but Debian 2.2 works fine. So be aware that you might have to experiment a little.

Let the revolution begin…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

I was called in to an emergency meeting yesterday morning. I was up to my eyebrows in alligators, but my boss was insistent. I had to be there. So I went. When we sat down, the tone was somber and slightly meandering. The guy who called the meeting just didn’t want to get to the point. Finally it hit me: Layoffs. That’s what this has to be about. So… Who’s gone? I’m not the highest-paid guy in my group, I’m probably the most versatile, and I’m not the most recent hire, so I’m probably safe. I was right about layoffs, or, more accurately, one layoff, followed by a restructuring. And the layoff wasn’t me.
I think we’re a better fit in our new structure (under our old organization we were married to a group that really didn’t like my group, or at least they didn’t like me, and now we’re married to a group that does, for the most part, like my group), and my boss’ new boss is so busy we shouldn’t have to worry about him messing with much. But I don’t like change, and my Scottish clan’s motto, “Fide et Fortitudine” loosely translates into “loyalty and guts” today. The loyalty side of me has some problems with what happened yesterday, but looking at it strictly from a business standpoint, I sure can’t argue with it.

Meanwhile, I needed about three minutes’ worth of quality time with that indignant hard drive to get the data I so desperately wanted. I got it. Next struggle: Getting Windows NT to work properly with eighth-rate hardware. This PC has a generic RealTek 8139-based card (so we’re talking a generic clone of a Linksys or D-Link card here… A clone of a clone), Trident Blade 3D video, ESS 1868 sound, and an AOpen 56K modem (at least it wasn’t a Winmodem). The AOpen modem is, by a longshot, the best component in the machine outside of the Gigabyte motherboard and Pentium II-450 CPU. I’ll say one thing for brand-name hardware. Drivers are easy to come by and they generally install correctly the first time, every time. It took me an hour to track down Blade 3D drivers that work, then it took me a good 30-45 minutes to get those working. The Realtek drivers at least worked the first time. I never did get the ESS drivers working. The AOpen modem driver went off without a hitch, mostly because it’s actually a controller-based modem. I stand by my assertion that you can buy $10 components and spend $100 worth of time trying to get each of them working right, or you can buy $50-$75 components from a reputable maker and make them work the first time. Seeing as the more expensive components will probably work well together too and give better performance, it’s a no-brainer for me. Gimme Creative or Guillemot video and sound cards and pair that up with a 3Com or Intel NIC and I’ll be a happy camper.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about my bookstore adventures. I want to go read for a while.

OK, I’m back for a second. I can’t resist. Not quite four years ago, I had a conversation with another Journalism major/history minor (one who, unlike me, actually finished his history minor, if I recall correctly). Over dinner with my then-significant other, he told me all about his theory of generations, as she looked on, entranced. The nasty breakup that soon followed that conversation overshadowed it, and I didn’t think of it again until last night, when I spotted the book Generations, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, on the shelf of a used bookstore. Curious, I looked at it, and sure enough, this was where that guy got his ideas. It was marked six bucks. I bought it, started reading, and gained some insight on myself. Why do I go ga-ga over the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and get chills whenever I read about his personal life because it all feels so familiar? He and I are from parallel generational cycles. His generation thought like mine does, so we grew up in similar peer environments. Why do I understand people 10 years older than me so much better than people 10 years younger than me? I was born 7 years before the end of my generational cycle.

Setting up Freesco for port forwarding

Dave Farquhar Linux , , ,

It’s a little late, but here’s how Gatermann and I got a Web server running behind a Freesco-based router. Freesco, despite the name, is a micro-distribution of Linux (based on the 2.0.x kernel) that offers firewalling, NAT, caching DNS, port forwarding, a lightweight Web server, and print services on a single floppy. Requirements are minimal; it’d run on a 386 with 8 megs of RAM, a floppy drive, and a pair of NE2000 NICs. For performance and ease of setup, I recommend a P75 (or faster, but a P75’s overkill; the main reason to use it is to get PCI) with a pair of PCI NICs and 8 megs.
What NICs do I recommend? Avoid the new Netgear FA311. The older FA310 worked fabulously, but Freesco doesn’t provide a module for the FA311’s NatSemi chipset, at least not yet. (The source code for a module is available at scyld.com and it’s compatible with the 2.0.x kernel, but compiling a kernel module isn’t a trivial operation for most of Freesco’s audience.) I’d probably go with a Realtek 8139-based card like a D-Link DFE-530TX+, a recent 3Com PCI card, or a PCI NE2000 clone. There’s a modules archive you can download that supports most other common NICs. A pair of D-Links, a P75 board, a floppy and this disk ought to give you nearly plug-and-play operation.

Enough of that. Here are the answers to the questions Freesco asked, in order.

Boot off the floppy. When it asks what you want to make with it, select ethernet router. Hostname doesn’t matter. Accept default for domain name, unless you’ve registered a domain for your LAN.

Don’t detect modems. Select two network cards. If you are using PCI cards, answer 0 to next four questions (IRQ, I/O). If you’re using ISA cards, enter the addresses and IRQs the cards use. DHCP? Depends on your ISP.

The first card’s name is eth0. (This is the card for your cable/dsl modem). Don’t use dhcp logging. Don’t update DNS by DHCP. Second card is eth1. Give it an IP address (10.x.x.x is fine, which is Freesco’s default; normally I use 192.168.1.x network and put my router on 192.168.1.1). Network mask will almost always be 255.255.255.0. I don’t configure for DHCP, so I don’t give it an IP range. if you want one, tell it the range of addresses you want to reserve. The fewer the better, for memory purposes, especially if you’ve only got 8 MB of RAM in the box.

Caching DNS? Answer S (secure). Don’t log.

Enable DHCP? Depends. If you don’t want to configure your LAN manually, DHCP is nice. If your LAN is already configured, DHCP is probably more trouble than it’s worth.

Public HTTP server. Answer Y. Default is S. Port 80. (You might be able to get away with answering N here, and you’ll save a little memory. DO NOT answer S–you’ll never forward port 80 if you do.)

Time server via HTTP? No.

Print server. No.

Telnet server. no.

Screensaver/spindown? 5 min is fine.

Swap file–0 if you have 8 mb or more. I suppose you could run Freesco on some tiny machines if you put in a small hard drive and enabled the swap file, but as cheap as a P75 with a pair of 4-meg SIMMs is these days, I wouldn’t bother.

Extra modules/programs? No.

Log: take defaults.

Host gateway–depends on ISP. Check one of your other PCs and use it.

Primary/secondary DNS. Use your ISP’s. Proxy, probably none. Check your ISP.

Export services? YES. This is the magic forwarding formula.

Now, assuming your web server is on 10.42.42.3, you’d use this line in config:

t,80,10.42.42.3/80

If you want to export other services, like, say, IMAP on port 143, add additional lines, subbing in the appropriate port and IP address. (HTTP is port 80.)

Pick a root password and web admin password, save configuration and reboot. You’re up and going.

Now, to configure your Windows boxes to get their Internet connection through your lovely what-was-old-is-new-again Freesco router, just open your TCP/IP settings, give it an IP address on the same subnet as your Freesco router if it doesn’t already have one, and set your gateway and DNS to the address you gave your Freesco router.

Voila. Configure your system’s BIOS for keyboardless operation if it has such an option, then take the keyboard and monitor away, write-protect the floppy and make a backup of it just in case (or burn it to a bootable CD if the machine is capable of booting off CD and you have an old drive to put in it) stick the box in a corner somewhere, and forget about it. If you have a power failure, it’ll reboot and happily start itself up again. As for stability, I find Freesco, in combination with decent hardware, is more stable than the hardware routers that are popular these days. Since it has a caching DNS, it’ll usually give you better performance too. And since you can probably build one with parts you have laying around, it’s cheaper.

Building up a new Linux server

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

I built a simple PC yesterday. The server that hosts this site is just too overloaded, and I was getting ready to order some parts when I spied a Celeron-366 board and CPU sitting in a case under my desk. I had trouble getting it working reliably, but I figured I’d give it one more shot. I’d used Hyundai memory in it previously; I slipped in a stick of Crucial, and it fired right up. Interesting.
I watched the temperature monitor in the BIOS and wasn’t too happy to see the Celeron-366 running at a nearly constant 60 degrees Centigrade. Modern CPUs typically run about 40-50, and each 10 degrees halves life expectancy. So I put a beefier CPU cooler on it, but the chip continued to run at around 60. So I looked up the Celeron at Intel’s site, and found the maximum temperature for Celerons is 85 degrees. So I was running a good 25 degrees below max, and it looked like I wouldn’t get below 60 degrees without active cooling, so I put the cheaper CPU cooler back on. Out of curiosity I overclocked the chip to 550 MHz for a while to see what would happen. The temperature rose to 65 degrees within seconds but stayed fairly constant. So it would appear that running at 550 would be safe, but I stepped back down to 366. I don’t want to overclock a system that I’m depending on for anything. For a few minutes I stepped it down to 330 MHz (using a 60 MHz bus) but it didn’t cool down any more after doing that, and running on a 60 MHz bus would give me a serious performance hit, so I stepped it back up to 366.

I scrounged around looking for parts and found enough to assemble a computer, but not a very good one. Being this close, I didn’t really want to do mail order and wait for parts to come in. So I checked CompUSA’s web site to see if they had anything competitive. Indeed they did–a 50X Delta-brand CD-ROM drive for $20 after rebate. Seeing as CompUSA always has some hard drive for $99-$109, I figured I’d make a trip over there. Sure, I could order a hard drive for $82 online, but a CD-ROM drive would cost me $40, so I’d make up the difference and have something that day.

When I got there I found another special–a 20-gig CompUSA by Maxtor hard drive for $99 with a $50 mail-in rebate. A lady was there examining the drive’s packaging. I picked one up. “4500 rpm, 128K buffer,” I read. “Where’s the speed?” she asked me. I pointed to a sticker on the side. “Wow. And I thought 5400 was slow enough.” She set the drive down and went looking at the drives on the shelf.

I was impressed. That was the first time I’ve ever met someone in person who was concerned about hard drive speed.

Now, about that speed… Yeah, it’s slow (I suspected the package actually contained a Quantum Fireball lct–Maxtor and Quantum have completed their merger) but it’s a cheap way to store a mountain of data and in an emergency it can boot an OS. At $2.50/gig, why not? So I grabbed one. I also grabbed the cheap 50X CD-ROM. I poked around the store a while, didn’t find anything else that caught my fancy, so I checked out. The cashier offered a replacement plan on the two parts. I declined–on stuff this cheap, I’ll just bank that money and take my chances.

The Fireball lct is indeed a poor performer. It would have been a middling performer in 1997, but this isn’t 1997 anymore. But I can live with it. It has one distinct advantage: It’s whisper-quiet. This PC makes very little noise. A fanless microATX box with a VIA C3 processor and a Fireball lct would be nearly silent and still fast enough to be useful. My other PCs sound like wind tunnel fans in comparison to this. And this drive will do for a testbed, if not as a production server–it’ll still be far faster than the P120 I’m using. I’d say there’s a 75 percent chance that system will end up hosting this site. The hard drive isn’t the bottleneck here–my DSL connection and CPU power are. The Celeron will solve the CPU problem, and hopefully with enough power to spare to run Mod_Gzip so that Apache can send compressed data to recent Web browsers, and thus solve the bandwidth issues too.

Anyway, I went ahead and put the 50X CD and Fireball lct in an old AT case, along with the Celeron-366 motherboard and 128 MB of RAM, a Cirrus Logic-based AGP card only a server could love, and a D-Link PCI 10/100 NIC to give myself a very basic meat-and-potatoes system. I noted the CD-ROM drive doesn’t fit as snugly as a Toshiba or an NEC and it definitely looks cheaper (but I’ve seen cheaper-looking drives still), and for 20 bucks I won’t complain. Mandrake 7.2 installed in about 15 minutes, but I found I was too aggressive–Mandrake’s hard disk optimizations and this motherboard’s chipset don’t get along. So I reinstalled with less aggressive settings. I made the mistake of doing a kitchen-sink install so it doesn’t run as well as it should. Basically at this point I need to tear it down and install, I dunno, BIND, Apache, Samba, and the kernel. That’s enough for what I want this machine to be able to do. I should probably look into building a kickstart script to do the job so I don’t have to answer any questions.

But that’s a project for another day.

More Like This: Hardware Linux

04/24/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

A sense of wonder. It must have been almost 20 years ago, I read a short story in a magazine involving a wondrous new tool. I don’t exactly remember the plot line, but it was something similar to this: a preteen boy comes into a sum of money under questionable circumstances. He’s uncomfortable going to his parents about it, or even his peers. Not knowing where else to go, he turns on his dad’s computer and types his story into it–whether this was a built-in Basic language interpreter like a Commodore or Atari, or a command line like CP/M or MS-DOS, it didn’t say. At the end of the story he hits Return, or Enter, or whatever that key’s supposed to be called, and the computer responds with one sentence:

Sorry, can’t compute.

That line gave the story its title.

I don’t know why I remember that story, except maybe for the technical inaccuracy. At any rate, I seem to recall he left without turning the computer off, so his dad came home, noticed the computer was on, read what was on screen, and confronted him. And that was pretty much the end, at least how I remember it.

Last night I was making up a batch of barley and mushroom soup from a recipe I found over the weekend. I know when I’m out of my element, and trying new recipes without any help at all is among them. The recipe called for 4 tablespoons of dry sherry. Now, I’m not a wine drinker, unless drinking wine twice a year counts. I was pretty sure that sherry is a type of wine. But white wine? Red wine? I didn’t know. As I was picking up the other ingredients I needed, I went to the wine and liquor section of the local grocery store and wandered around a while. I couldn’t find any sherry.

So I went home. I figured I was probably in the minority as far as not knowing anything about dry sherry, but I also figured I probably wasn’t the first one to have questions about it. I fired up a Web browser, went to Google, and typed a question: What is dry sherry? I was able to infer very quickly from the site hits that, indeed, dry sherry is a wine. But I couldn’t find any. So I typed in another search phrase: “dry sherry substitute.” That put me in business. A lot of people have asked that question. One of the first documents hit offered several suggestions, marsala among them. I have a little bottle of marsala in one of my kitchen cabinets. So I made the soup, and it wasn’t bad.

The moral of that short story remains unchanged: A computer still can’t answer questions on its own, particularly questions of ethics–the experiments of www.mindpixel.com notwithstanding. What Mindpixel is doing is storing and cross-referencing the answers to millions of simple questions in hopes of one day being able to answer complex ones. (The results of that are fairly impressive–last night I asked it several simple questions like, “Was Ronald Reagan president of the United States in 1981?” and “Is Joe Jackson the name of both a famous musician and a famous baseball player?” and it answered all of them correctly.) But what Mindpixel, or for that matter, any good search engine can do effectively is gather and retain information. And that in itself is extremely useful, and the idea of search engines indexing a global database and answering simple–and not-so-simple–questions was unthinkable to most people just 20 years ago.

And I found a sale. I’m suddenly in need of a large number of network cards, as regular readers know. Just out of curiosity, I checked CompUSA’s pricing on Bay Netgear FA311 NICs, and–drum roll–they’re $14.99 with a $5 mail-in rebate. That’s a steal. It’s not quite as striking as the deal I found on D-Link cards at Circuit City back in January, but I like the Netgear–or at least its predecessor, the FA310TX–better anyway.

The AT’s coming out of retirement

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

Scary thoughts. UPS dropped off a pair of Soyo AT socket 370 motherboards while I was at work yesterday. So I’ll be picking those up from the apartment office after it opens this morning. That only means one thing. My PC/AT is about to come out of retirement.

Let’s think about that for a minute. When this ancient thing was built, Ronald Reagan was just starting his second term. The Soviet Union still existed, and the Evil Empire loomed large. The most popular game console wasn’t the Sony Playstation–it was the Atari 2600. Some popular rock’n’roll bands of the day: The Police and Duran Duran. U2 was on the map and rock critics knew them, but to the majority of people, the name conjured up images of a spyplane if it meant anything at all. The minivan as we know it today was just coming onto the market.

Dell Computer Corp. existed only as an operation out of a dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin, and it was known as PCs Limited. Gateway 2000 didn’t yet exist. The #2 maker of IBM-compatible PCs was Tandy.

Popular movies included Romancing the Stone, The Terminator, and Sixteen Candles.

U.S. airlines that were still in business: TWA, Eastern, and Pan Am. The most troubled airline at the time was Branniff Airways, which was in a long bankruptcy proceeding (it would later make a comeback, then die again).

Anyway… I pulled the PC/AT case out of storage, dug out some drive rails, found some Phillips screws that fit it (IBM insisted on using old-style slotted screws for some insane reason–I hate those), and I even dug out a vintage YE Data 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy drive like IBM used. Then, noticing the 17 years’ worth of accumulated grime, I gave the case a bath. Now it looks two years old instead of 17. Actually, it looks pretty darn good. They don’t build ’em like that anymore. Of course, for what that case would cost to build today, an OEM can probably build an entire PC.

I’ve also accumulated other components: a junky Trident-based AGP video card is also about to come out of retirement, as is my old Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum card with SCSI interface. That CD-ROM drive died long ago, but I’ve got an NEC 2-speed SCSI drive that looks great in the case. (This system’s all about retro looks; if I need speed, I’ll use a CD-ROM drive off my network.) To accomodate that, I’ve got a D-Link 10/100 PCI NIC.

Just one thing’s holding up this project: Computer Surplus Outlet just shipped my Celeron processors. I ordered the boards and chips the same day. That’s annoying.

01/02/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , ,

Mailbag:

IE shortcut; Optimizing WinME; Partition; 10/100 NIC; Mobos

Trimming down Windows 2000. Someone else observed last week that, among other things, Windows’ included games are now critical system components. That’s messed up. Fortunately, it’s fixable.

Open the file C:WinntInfsysoc.inf in your favorite text editor, after making a backup copy of course. Search for the string “HIDE,” (without quotes, but including the comma). Delete all references to this string. Save the file. Reboot. Now open Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, and go down to Windows System Components. You can now cleanly uninstall the Windows components that may not be useful to you, such as the Space Cadet Pinball game, or the Accessibility Options. I’m in the habit of just banging on the shift key several times to turn off my screen blanker. Why shift? Because it won’t send weird keystrokes to whatver application I left running in the foreground. Unfortunately, hitting shift five times usually pops up the Accessibility options, much to my annoyance. So I was very glad to finally be able to uninstall that feature.

And a bargain NIC. This week only, Circuit City is selling the D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 NIC for $14.99 with a $9.99 mail-in rebate. While I prefer the DEC Tulip chipset for inexpensive 10/100 NICs, the Realtek chipset in this D-Link works with Linux and Windows, and that’s an absolute giveaway price. I mean, come on, most of us spend that much every week on soda.

I’ve got a D-Link laying around as a spare, but I had a Circuit City gift card with about $7 left on it, so I picked one up. Besides, I needed a stereo miniplug-to-dual-RCA cable, so suddenly I had two semi-compelling reasons to go to the shark-infested cave. It’s good to have some spare parts, and the D-Links have much better compatibility than the NDC card with the obscure Macronix 98715 chipset I still have in at least one of my systems.

I’ve seen some ludicrous claims that D-Link gives you 3Com and Intel quality at a Linksys price. I don’t buy it for a minute. But for a small home-based network, why pay $40-$60 for a NIC if you don’t have to?

And somehow I managed to avoid the sharks as well. I guess I just didn’t have Pentium 4 tattooed across my forehead.

Amazon now seems to be selling Optimizing Windows at its full retail price of $24.95. Obviously sales are slower now than when it was selling at (sometimes deeply) discounted prices, but still much better than November levels. If you’ve bought it, my heartfelt thanks go out to you. If you’ve posted a review, another thank you.

If you’ve read it and like it and feel like writing a review, either at Amazon or another online bookseller such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Bookpool or Fatbrain, please feel free to do so. I appreciate it greatly. And if you have comments or questions on the book, feel free to e-mail me.

If you’re wanting to do a price compare on Optimizing Windows, visit www2.bestbookbuys.com/cgi-bin/bbb.cgi?ISBN=1565926773.

Mailbag:

IE shortcut; Optimizing WinME; Partition; 10/100 NIC; Mobos