Hi guys,
maybe some of you were wondering that I’ve written something about Mac OS X Server yesterday. Well, the truth is, that with the 30″ Cinema HD Display, I’ve also ordered a Mac mini Snow Leopard Server. Planned as Media-Station & Server-mixture in the living room, it turned out, that this will not work as expected. But… let me start at the beginning…
Good evening,
after some days of silence, I think it makes sense to explain what happend.
First of all: I’ve launched my business “dennisklein.eu” successfully on Monday 
So – great to be back to my own business.
But let me scroll back a few days. The last time, I’ve told you, that I’ve moved to a new ISP, called VirtualBots. They had a nice offer to testdrive the vServer for 30 days. I was impressed, grabbed one package and asked them if it’s possible to upgrade with a managed software. They wanted to do the management and installed Confixx (by Parallels) for me. This thing worked smooth and nice, with some rough corners. For example the security of the Apache was not as I hoped, I could not even install phpSysInfo (and who knows me KNOWS that I love phpSysInfo!). I was nearly finished moving most of my websites to the new server (which now costed 60€ instead of 19€ monthly, which is a fair price) – the main server dropped off. Nothing. Silence. OF COURSE, my old webserver decided to do the same at this morning. So – nothing worked. No mail, no website. I was able to restart my olden goldie webserver at Server4You with a remote hard-reset. And it was back. Of course – broken and need to be replaced pretty soon.
Hi guys,
Dear customers,
welcome to my new website. It’s not just a facelift. No – it’s a movement into working with an existing CMS. I was working on my own CMS for almost 1 1/2 years pretty hard, but with the new challenges that founding an own company delivers, I had the feeling that I need to jump onto the most famous CMS “bandwagon” called WordPress. It has been evolved since I installed it the last time (which is 5 years ago) to use for our private home-build-blog.
Hi guys,
since sunday I’m working on a new project in the late hours of the days. Since I moved to the new home office, I’ve no own ISDN connection in this room which means: I’ve no telephone available in the regular way. Sure, I have this cordless ISDN phone which I take to the home office every day at the moment, but it could be so much more comfortable. I mean – hey – I’ve an Cisco 7960 IP Phone sitting on my desk and I’ve a brand new GN Netcom “Jabra” USB Headset which I mainly bought a few days ago, when my new Logitech Headset broke down, for my daily work from the home office.
So, the plan was to create an Asterisk server inside one of the machines in the rack to put my to the ISDN line using the SIP phones (Cisco 7960) as well as the softphones on the different computers.
First, I thought I just need my few weeks back bought HFC ISDN card for everything and that I could use it on my DELL PowerEdge 1650. Well, that doesn’t work, because it’s a 3.5V card and the PCI-X slots on the DELLs riser card are made for 5V cards. Too bad. My next idea was to use it in the main fileserver which currently runs Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard Edition with some nice VMs. Of course there was NO driver available for Windows Vista/2008 64bit and I can’t link this card to a VM. Hm.. so the only way to go on with my project was to create another server for the rack.
So I grabbed my AMD64EE and put it inside my “beige” 19″ 4U case which was not used before. Hint for all of you who want to buy a new case for 19″: Pay more! Using those <100 Euro cases it HELL! My next case would be a SuperMicro or Chenbro, even if they are a "bit" more expensive. Anyway.
I've put on Debian Lenny as system OS and installed Asterisk following a bunch of tutorials I found on the net. The Asterisk itself was fast set up, but the configuration is so text-based, that I've installed Asterisk-GUI which works nice now 
After spending some hours over 2 evenings & nights, my internal Asterisk works now. Most annoying thing was to make the Cisco IP Phone work with Asterisk, but in the end I solved it. Currently, I can make calls from any PC/Mac to this phone and vice versa and of course from any PC to PC or Mac to Mac or... you get the idea
But that's not what I initially wanted. I want to pick up the phone and call someone from outside. Well, that's a bit complicated with Asterisk, especially if you want to use your old ISDN phones with Asterisk.
What you need and how it should look alike is shown in the Visio drawing I've done yesterday to get an overview (click to show it in full size):
The current state is, that the connection between the ISDN and the Asterisk does not yet work. I’ve already put in both ISDN cards (1x HFC / 1x AVM Fritz), but the HFC is currently not used. First challenge is to make the ISDN connection work to the outsite. The rest is luxus
Here’s a link to an older video or playing around the first time with Asterisk and the phone, but it mainly looks like the current setup and – yeah – I think some of you know this ringtone
Have a nice day!
Ciao
Dennis
Useful links:
- Cisco 7960x on Asterisk
- Sources for your 7960x like ringtones
- Das Asterisk Buch (German)
Hi guys,
4 days ago, I’ve posted about the pain of selecting the right OS. I would love to write: “I’ve found it! XYZ is the perfect match for me!”, but this does not happen (yet). And believe me: I don’t make it easy for myself.
I leaned back for an hour or so and thought about the local infrastructure here. Thinking about 3 screaming servers in the basement, a screaming loud Linksys GBit 19″ switch and a powerful PC at the attic. Hmm…
To be honest, after thinking for a time, I ask myself for what I will need it, I thought about energy costs and virtualization aspects of the new Q9650 CPU in my workstation. The servers are running at a very low CPU and RAM usage (sure, Linux uses around 100% of the RAM, but just because it’s there). Hmm… 2 wasting servers and an IPCop. Do you get what I was thinking about? Right! The workstation could handle some VMs while running, this would save me around 160 Watts. Calculate this over a month, a year – win/win – without loosing the comfort of different servers.
Good point – in my mind and the first step into the right direction. (Some of you may think: What!? He has so great hardware and think about not using it?! – Yep! But good to have a backup, right?).
Turning to the workstation, here’s what I did in the last few days on my PC.
First of all, I’ve removed the RAID from my server HADRON and put it back to the PC. Initially I’d bought the RAID for the workstation. I wanted to run Vista, having 2 graphic cards in the PC aswell. A PC that could be created by Stefan Didak
The truth is, I have a different scope of (private) work I’m doing here at home. Work is done on a single ThinkPad using Windows XP.
But back to the last 4 days. Now, that I’ve set up Windows Vista on the 6TB RAID, which is nice fast and secure, I’m trying to get back to Windows day by day. It’s pretty hard, if you’ve used OS X for the last few years mainly for private work. I don’t count the business stuff, because I work with special tools there and I know how to handle it, so XP works for me there.
Over the weekend, I’ve done some work on a PHP/MySQL web-app, I’m currently writing. Guess what I’ve used for this. You got it: My MacBook. Not that I couldn’t use Intype in Windows instead of TextMate on OS X and WinSCP on Windows instead of Transmit on OS X… Well, on one hand, I’ve worked for hours on Sunday in the bed. The last day of the 1 week vacation and we watched some TV series while I was working on the web-app. Right now, I’m writing this post on my MacBook, which lies in front of my PC keyboard and in front of the 2 displays.
Hmm…
Damn – if I would find a way to use the RAIDset as bootable volume for a Hackintosh based system, I think I would vote for this. But I think that’s not possible
Turning to the other site: before I’ve installed the RAIDset, I tried installing Debian, getting the graphic card to work was a challenge, but there’s Google, so I found a nice tutorial or call it HowTo. When I got this to work and also had the WindowMaker running in German instead of US, I wanted to play a video at the freshly installed VLC. No sound. Oh dear! Installing and configuring for hours and I have no sound. Of course – I had installed it from scratch and not “Desktop” in the installation setup – me fool.
To make long things short: I’d wasted 5h’s and was a little bit frustrated, so I’d inserted the Ubuntu 9.04 64bit CD that was laying on my desk and installed this instead. Hmm.. nice, but… even with the running sound, I found some bugs usung Xinerama and 2 diplays (the cursor stays at the left screen when I moved it to the left one for example, and does not fade away). I played around with Ubuntu for some more minutes or maybe 2 hours. It simply does not fit to me – as a desktop. It doesn’t worked for me really in the past and it will not work for me in the future.
Isn’t this great? I’ve removed Linux from my “possible desktop”-list.
Now there are just two systems left:
- Mac OS X as a Hackintosh installation
- Windows Vista 64bit
Not easy to choose, I see pros in both parts, but I really don’t want to have a Dual-Setup. Why not? Well, I would more switch from System to System than doing something productive. Currently, I do a enough unproductive
That’s the current status. Can’t await your comments
Ciao
Dennis
[Update]
Hi, just found this interesting YouTube video from Chris Pirillo I would like to show you, so I grabbed it and… well – here it is Have fun!
Hey guys,
in the last few weeks I spend some time on building and expanding my 19″ rack in the basement. After rebuilding the Home Office earlier, I had to do this .
I’ve added a new Gigabit-Switch and 3 new servers.
Have fun with the video
Here are the mentioned technical data from the video:
HADRON:
- AMD64EE 2.0GHz (DualCore)
- 4GB RAM (DDR2/800)
- 6TB RAID5 storage (6x 1TB WD Green disks)
- Areca PCIe x8 RAID controller
- 2 GBit NICs
- Cologne Chip HFC-S ISDN card for Asterisk
- Debian Lenny 5.0.1
BLACKPEARL:
- Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz (DualCore)
- 4GB RAM (DDR2/553)
- 2x 200GB storage disks
- 2x GBit NICs
- Debian Lenny 5.0.1
TORTUGA:
- Intel Pentium III 1.4GHz
- 2GB RAM (ECC Registered)
- 36GB SCSI/UW320 storage disk (10k upm)
- 2x GBit NICs onboard
- IPCop 1.4.21
(NONAMEYET):
- AMD Athlon XP 1800
- 512MB RAM
- no disk
- 100 MBit/s PCI card
- no system
- BROKEN! Need to be fixed
Ciao
Dennis
Hey guys,
when moving to a larger and modern PC architecture, I simply had one PC with no usage – yet. So I seeked out for a good reason to put it into another 4U case and add it to my rack. My primary server (AMD64EE, 6TB RAID5 Areca storage, 4GB RAM & Debian Lenny) is pretty nice and ready for new challenges like mt-daapd, smb, afp, nfs & apache2 of course with MySQL and PHP.
My wife would like to test the new 7 RC on her notebook. She’s currently using Vista 32bit Ultimate and pretty happy with it and does not want to move the well installed version into trash. Buying a 2nd harddisk is also no option, because changing the harddisk often is annoying and unsatisfying. One option would be to use a tool like Acronis DiskDirector and split the 120GB HD into two parts to install 7 on the new one. Nice, but it could be nicer.
A few weeks ago, my colleague from Zürich told me about the VMWare ESXi server which is available for free. He said it’s pretty cool and fast. VMWare ESXi let you install a 32MB Linux on the primary disk. On top of that, of course you need a large storage if you want to add some images and a fast NIC. I thought I was prepared for this. Installing the system was pretty easy and just a thing of a few minutes.
First, I tried to install it on an AHCI volume which is attached to my ICH9 onboard controller of my Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 mainboard. This works fine, doing the first boot, I got no option to change the IP of the machine. It was set to “0.0.0.0 (STATIC)”. After reading a bit through the manual, I found out, that the NIC is not supported. Ok – no problem. I’ve laying around a bunch of different NICs with different chipsets. So I installed a Realtek 8169S card – a Gigabit PCI card and booted the machine. For my surprise, the harddisk was no bootable. Pretty strange. I installed the system again with no success. The first boot worked, the NIC was not detected and I was exactly where I started before. The next card I tried was a D-Link DLG10028C Gigabit PCI card – exactly the same issues including that I had to reinstall the system again. To make it short, with my 3com Gigabit PCI card, I had the issues. Again, the system didn’t boot from the harddisk when I’d rebooted it once. First boot works like a charme, second fails.
Seems like VMWare expects something special like an Intel chipset card to work. Unfortunaly, I’ve no idea where my Intel Desktop Pro 1000MT PCI Gigabit card is, I searched on my hardware stock in the basement, without success. That was my quick try to use the VMWare ESXi and I’m not sure (more because of the boot issues than because of the NIC problems) if I’ll give it a new chance. Another big question is, if I could use OS X on this – I don’t think so.
Any ideas to solve this issue are more than welcome!
Ciao
Dennis
Hi guys,
a few weeks ago I wrote (a bit in anger, I admit) about my concerns with the 3.0.6 Firefox on both Systems, Windows and Mac. Meanwhile, the current version has been grown to the version 3.0.8 and I must revert my opinion about my bad comments on it. I’m using it forth and it looks like Mozilla has fixed those issues.
I’d no crashes for a long time (except 1 today which was initiated by one of our tools at work (my colleagues know what I mean ).
It’s not that I just shout about anything, I also welcome fixes 
Ciao
Dennis
Good morning guys,
Saesh has asked me, if I’ve tried using NFS from FreeBSD and OS X as client. Well, I had it in mind, but haven’t tested it yet. So, yesterday morning I gave it a try.
NFS comes integrated in FreeBSD 7.1 (which is the system that I use on the fileserver). All you have to do to start it up are those steps:
Add those 3 lines to your /etc/rc.conf
rpcbind_enable="YES"
nfs_server_enable="YES"
mountd_flags="-r"
Next, create your own /etc/exports in the format:
/storage 192.168.0.123
This will allow the client with the IP 192.168.0.123 to access the fileserver’s share (path: /storage) via NFS. Also in Leopard, NFS is built it, but there are a few more steps to do before you can try to log on.
Most important: Check if nfsd (NFS daemon) is running yet, if so – kill the processes.
# ps axu | grep nfsd
root 8918 0.0 0.0 4604 1380 ?? Is 2:30PM 0:00.03 nfsd: master
root 8919 0.0 0.0 4604 1072 ?? I 2:30PM 0:35.74 nfsd: server
root 8920 0.0 0.0 4604 1072 ?? I 2:30PM 0:18.33 nfsd: server
root 8921 0.0 0.0 4604 1072 ?? I 2:30PM 0:16.56 nfsd: server
root 8922 0.0 0.0 4604 1072 ?? I 2:30PM 0:16.20 nfsd: server
root 25658 0.0 0.0 5928 1220 p0 R+ 8:05AM 0:00.00 grep nfsd
# kill -9 8918 8919 8920 8921 8922
Ok – now you’re ready for the final initialization
# /etc/rc.d/mountd onereload
# rpcbind
# nfsd -u -t -n 4
# mountd -r
That’s it. Check your sharepoints with a simple
# showmount -e
Exports list on localhost:
/storage 192.168.0.123
You should be now able to mount your NFS share from OS X Leopard. But now, my problems begin. I’m currently now able to read/write from Leopard. Why? Well, I’m sure it’s again the every-time-killing-my-nerves user rights that annoys me here again.
But, slowly. On the Mac, press CMD+K, when you’ve selected the Finder. A popup will appear.
Mounting this should work and you will possibly get the following message, which means, that you don’t have rights to access this folder (*sigh* 
)
At the finder, it looks like this (do you see the little red sign inside the icon?).
What I’ve done is to create a new “share” or “export” in the /etc/exports of my Backup drive (2x 200GB which is more a testdrive with ZFS RAIDz1, too). I set the complete Volume to
# chmod 777 -R /backup
Then I mount it (don’t forget to)
# /etc/rc.d/mountd onereload
before you mount! Otherwise you will not be able to mount
Looks like it works, ha? Yes – a bit. I can now access the Backup Volume and copy a file from this share to my harddisk to test the speed. I’ve fixed the connection between the home office (attic) and the basement (server rack), so full 1GBit/s is available. I was able to copy the files with a rate of 70-80MByte/s from the server to the local disk inside my Mac.
That’s damn fast and a lot lot faster than SMB.
The bad thing is, I’m not able to write files onto this disk. Yes – since “chmod 777″ allows me, I’m able to create folders and also copy files to the disc, but I’m not able to use them. Let me show you an example:
I drag a file from my desktop to this share (fully “777″!)
Uh! Nice message for a simple PNG file, isn’t it? Well, that’s the point where I am at the moment. The NFS server is running, but I can’t really access my files. Sure, I can open the already stored files without problems, but adding new? Currently not possible.
Oh well, I found examples like this for the /etc/exports (mostly for Linux):
/storage 192.168.0.0/24(rw,sync,insecure)
This allows everyone from the 192.168.0.x network to access those files with read/write permissions. Insecure is a command that should work with Leopard. Nice! I tried it, but when I type “showmount -e” afterwards (and after refreshing mountd), I see NO shares, also Leopard is no more able to mount anything.
Ideas and help is really appreciated
Ciao
Dennis
Hey guys,
as little update, I’m happy to be back online with an IPCop. This incredible firewall, which in Linux based at freely available, is a great software that replaces my FritzBoxes – well, honestly that’s not true, because currently I need to use one FritzBox to connect to the main DSL (16MBit/s) line.
My wife got a brand new iMac 24″ on Monday, so we had one PC too much here. Some of you know that I own a 22U rack in the basement. So I decided to use this PC (Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 250GB SATA HDD) for the IPCop. The hardware is extremely oversized, but why not? Don’t using it at all is a bad idea, so – here we go.
The IPCop delivers now the following services to the network:
- DNS
- Internet Access
- Failover (if T-Online fails, IPCop will dial in to Arcor immediately)
- Proxy (Advanced Proxy)
- URL Filter (to block ads! Incredible speed boost for surfing)
- DHCP
The name of this machin is “blackpearl”. I had this name selected for our IPCop last year for the old installation (on a PIII/1GHz). I like it – and yes – it’s grabbed from Pirates of the Carrebian
At this weekend, the network will be redesigned completly. This means to put the Cat6 patchpanel to the patchpanel cabinet in the storage room and remove the current Cat5e one. Also, the FreeBSD server, which is now built into a 19″ 4U case, too, will be attached to the rack as well as the IPCop. I just need to solve on issue: I can’t get the lines currently to work on 1GBit/s, just with 100MBit/s. A tipp was to check the groundings of every patch and plug. What a lot of fun!
So – here’s just a photo of the FreeBSD server with the 6 attached harddisks. (Pssst! There’s enough space available for an 8 port SATA-II controller and a 3x 5.25″U 5 Port SATA-II Backplane 10TB RAIDz1 – here I come – well – within the next year or so! )
It’s sad, that the ZFS RAIDz1 is NOT extendable – yet (?). So creating a larger RAIDset would result in doing copies to.. well.. no idea
Ciao
Dennis
