While I was spending most of the time cooped up in the cab of my Dad’s Ford this evening, others were busy finding errors in my handiwork here

Correction

Professor Ray Hansen, who I can now entitle as one of my former supervisors, pointed out that towards the end of The Change We Need I mentioned that this was the first time we’d had a Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress AND a Democrat in the White House. I seem to have been very wrong there. It has, in fact, happened several times in the past. I don’t remember seeing *that* many Democratic presidents on the roster, but the answers lie here, and clearly show that in the last 60 years almost 20 of them have been spent with the Democrats in majority rule. But I will point out that its only been once in the last 30 years, twice if you count the incoming administration and Congress among them. Kudos to Ray for pointing out such fallacies

Hell on Ice

For those not following me on Twitter or Facebook, Dad and I went to do our yearly last-minute christmas shopping today. Unfortunately, we were struck by a mis-predicted ice storm, brought on but a sudden drop in temps and off-and-on showers all day onto an already frozen ground. We ended up finding no fewer than 5 detours home, which turned what should have been a 1 hour trip into almost 7.5 hours of Hell on Ice and consumed almost 3/4 of a tank of diesel fuel.

We had one more stop to make around 4:30 and afterwards were heading home. On the way into the Honey Baked store i noticed the parking lot was getting slick but didn’t really think much of it other than “Damn its cold!”  So we’d just picked up the honey baked hams for Christmas dinner (and leftovers!) and had to stop at a shop in Hebron, KY for some gifts.  The trip between those two locations should have taken 10 minutes but took almost an hour.  Fender benders on the somewhat slick roads were slowing everything down.  Leaving our last stop, we noticed the roads were starting to ice over and there were warnings being issued on the radio to stay off the roads if it at all possible.  I-275 was already backed up from accidents, so we decided to take a detour and hopefully get back on the interstate ahead of at least some of the mess.  The road looked more-or-less straight on the GPS.  This was where things got fun!

There’s nothing quite as scary as the feeling of being at the helm of your dad’s 11-month-old Ford F250 (lariat, crew cab, diesel, 4×4) on what could be graciously called a highway in middle-of-nowhere, Kentucky, only to discover a hill, covered in ice from top to bottom, full of twists and turns, with 6 cars already stopped or in the guard rail at various points. Well we made it across at least 3 of those, before coming to the Grand Finale.  I made it about 1/3 of the way to the top before coming up on a Pontiac, broadside in the roadway, at which point i gave up and we parked the truck (we later made a failed attempt to get back down the hill without ending up in the hillside or the guardrail.

We were there close to 2.5 hours until finally a highway department truck finally made it through and heavily salted the hill, melting what ended up being around 1/2″ of accumulated ice on the road.  And allowing us and several of the others who had collected there to make it to the top.  To give you an idea of how slick and steep it was: you couldn’t stand up straight without sliding down the hill, it was impossible. Keep in mind I’ve spent 7 years dealing with Purdue’s Ice Polishers™ (That’s where they affix power brooms to the front of small tractors to do “snow removal” on the sidewalks, which works ok on the snow, but as a side effect it smoothes and polishes the ice that is always underneath, making it impossible to USE the newly cleared sidewalk without the risk of personal injury), I have experience with slippery ice, and this stuff was WORSE.

Once we got off of that hill, we discovered that the bridge across the Ohio River on I-275, aka our only quick way home, was closed down completely and traffic waiting to cross was backed up almost 15 miles. There’s more than one way home, however, and between the truck’s GPS and both mine and dad’s knowledge of the back roads we figured we could find a faster way home that didn’t involve sitting for 3-4 hours while awaiting our turn to get back on the interstate.  So we headed back to Florence to head down I-75/71, the plan being to circle around and come across Markland Dam, just a few miles south of home.  Within 20 minutes we were back to a dead stop, this time because of an unknown issue.  No icy bridges on that road, and we were so far back in teh line of cars we couldn’t begin to see the front.  So we sat and tried to wait it out.  For another 90 minutes.  Both of us were about to go stir crazy i think.  Then we decided our time was better spent trying to find another way around, which resulted in us driving all the way to Dry Ridge, KY and circling around, getting back on the interstate near Glencoe, KY, where traffic was moving slowly but otherwise normally.

So Dad and I have already agreed, next year, the day after Thanksgiving, he and I are sitting down with laptops and credit cards, and doing all of our shopping from home.

Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to those 3 loyals readers I have!

So this summer when energy started to go through the roof I decided it was time to “green up” a little more and get more energy efficient about things, not to mention lower my electric bill as much as possible. So shortly after classes started this semester I picked up a Kill-A-Watt and did some measurements.

First, some background: My two servers (Altair and Polaris) are both cobble boxes, computers i have built from old or retired parts, at least to date. Polaris was my primary desktop until I got my Mac Pro, Altair was truly a cobble box and was filled with a hodgepodge of hardware that was typically hand-me-downs from any upgrades I did to my desktop. Prior to the introduction of the Pro to my geekosystem, Altair was my primary server, it ran Ubuntu and did everything (web, mysql, tftp, voip, dns, sftp, ssh, smb/nfs/afp, etc). Once I had Polaris, my options opened up some.

Altair Specs (old)

• 2800+ AMD Athlon
• Gigabyte GA7-NNXP Motherboard (is it bad I still remember this without having to look it up?)
• 1.5GB DDR400 Memory
• Whatever Video Card was working at the time
• 4 Port Rosewill SATA Controller
• PATA – 200GB, 320GB, 320GB, 60GB
• SATA – 320GB, 500G
• RX-82U Enclosure -> 750GB, 250G

Polaris Specs (current)

• AMD Athlon X2 3800+
• 3GB RAM (DDR400)
• Foxconn mATX Motherboard
• 160GB SATA system drive
• 250GB SATA storage drive

So I just got my Pro but wasn’t quite ready to take the retired hardware from Polaris and merge it into Altair yet. So what did I do? As any good geek would have, I installed VMWare Server One of my biggest issues with having my single box was that it was incredibly insecure. Anybody who pwned any of the services i was hosting off of it, several of them to the outside world for my remote use, had just hosed my single server. The goal was to end up with this:

Network Diagram – Spring/Summer 2008

I didn’t miss by much. I spent the latter half of the summer slowly migrating services to several VMs (Powered by Ubuntu JeOS) and ended up with a pretty sweet, diversified setup that I won’t detail here since this is supposed to be about Altair, the file server side. With the burden of these services removed from Altair I was able to do the first major overhaul of it that I have done since I first started using it in early 2006. With the intent of minimizing its energy use while maximizing storage, I ended up with these specs:

Altair Specs (new)

• Intel Celeron 430 (1.8Ghz, 35W Power consumption)
• Intel DG45ID Motherboard
• 2GB DDR2 800 (single stick)
• 2x100GB 7200RPM Seagate 2.5″ Primary Drives (Software RAID 1)
• 2x750GB Samsung Storage Drives
• 1x500GB Seagate Storage Drive
• 1x320GB Seagate Storage Drive
• Ubuntu 8.10 Server Beta (needed the new kernel support for the new hardware)

Some notes about the install, while researching what to do for a reliable, fault-tolerant drive setup for my primary data, about 30GB and growing of stuff that I would prefer not to lose, ever, I stumbled across this (Syba’s 2.5″ Mobile Drive Rack (CL-HD-MRDU25S)):

at Newegg. Populated with a pair of 100GB 2.5″ drives run in RAID 1 (mirroring), it left valuable 3.5″ slots open for larger capacity drives that I can’t afford to run mirrored, and gives me 100GB of reliable storage to use for my boot disk and precious data. I also get a read boost from them because of the RAID1, which is always nice. Of course all of this lives in my Lian-Li case, which is a twin to the case Polaris lives in (I liked it so much I bought a 2nd one when they were on sale again), which acts like a giant heatsink and keeps everything frigid.

Back to the power usage. First, a benchmark for comparison: my Mac Pro and its 4 monitor setup (1×20″, 2×17″, 1×15″) draws roughly 400W of power while i’m using it. That includes M-Audio AV30 speakers, a Cisco 7960, Netgear GS108 Gigabit Switch, USB and Firewire hubs, mouse charger(s), a 1200VA UPS, you get the picture. I forget what the exact kWh used per day was but it wasn’t nearly as bad as one would think. I think by my calculations (rough at best) it costs me about $12USD / month to power my workstation 24/7/365. Polaris and Altair running headless were peaking around 410W of power usage, not terrible but not respectable by any stretch since the Mac Pro would smoke both of them put together in any benchmark.

While Altair was down I took the liberty to check the draw on Polaris and it was hovering at 140-180W of usage, so Altair was sucking down the lions share of the power, my guess would be all those old, inefficient PATA disks. Right now fully operational with its new upgrades, Altair is drawing about 95W. I cut the power usage of that box by at least half, approaching one-third. The impact on my electricity bill each month isn’t going to be a shocking as I would like it to be, but wow. All that money I’ve been throwing away for so long on powering something so inefficient.

Right now I’m down slightly on storage, as the drives I removed aren’t quite covered by the single 750GB drive that went in their place, but I have enough headroom to account the immediate future and with the price of storage continually falling its only a matter of time before another deal on 750GB or 1TB drives tempts me enough for me to add some capacity.

Long story short, here are some pictures, try not to make fun of my “rack” too much, it works, it keeps thing cool, though I’m having to keep an eye on the temperatures in the garage, it is starting to get kinda chilly outside and I want to make sure things don’t get cold enough to start having problems with condensation…

Servers – Front View

Servers – Rear View

Altair – Side Panel & Filter

Altair – Inside Shot

Altair – The Power Supply

Altair – Syba 2.5″ Drive Bay Adapter

Altair – The Main Drives