Fifth Street Datacenter-let
  Last viewed: Dec 09, 2009, 05:12:03 AM (GMT)

Winnemucca, NV--Look for pictures soon of Bicycle Mike's custom trailers... Mike's a former industrial maintenance engineer, claimed doctorate in psychology (?), and builder of rather ingenious bicycle trailers. Photos back by tomorrow, scanned by the weekend with luck. I inherited my Mom's old SCSI HP scanner, which has a yellow stripe down the side but enough good area left to scan prints. I got the thing working with my little P166 laptop, which has a docking station that accepted an old scsi card I found in my parts box. The laptop actually has a SCSI bus built in, but the connector is some weird proprietary HP thing (Boo, Hiss), so I had to fall back to an PCI<->SCSI converter card in the dock.

In other computer news, I am beginning to have a full-fledged data center in my utility room. Sitting here in the cool comfort of my basement abode, between the water heater and the bathroom, I have before me:

1. A nice mahogany plywood computer rack/cart/desk that I just built using some of Dad's lumber scraps

2. A 50MHz 486DX with 16MB of RAM (Dell 450/L) little pizza box home PC with the hard drive disconnected... boots from a write-protected floppy running LEAF Bering 1.0rc3 with Shorewall firewall. It routes traffic between two networks--mine, and the Internet. So all my computers can share one connection. Right now, that's a dial-on-demand modem (28.8 USRobotics Sportster -- it was some fun getting the init string right on that thing!). But soon, it will be a $30/mo DSL line (with DSL modem and a NIC free with a year contract!). Nice thing about this machine is the BIOS lets you specify "no hard drive." A lot of 486's won't boot without a hard disk unless you're there to perform keyboard input, not good in case of a brief power outage. This box also runs a dnscache, sets time from the Internet, has a web serverlet with status/diagnostic pages, etc. If I can pick up a second floppy disk drive somewhere cheap, I'll have room (on the second floppy) to run other stuff like ssh and sshd. Another approach would be to turn the box into a true headless setup and connect via a serial connection--that saves you enough room on the boot floppy to run some exras. The floppy by the way is formatted to 1680 capacity rather than the usual 1440. This seems reasonably reliable, and I could even try 1920 or so, but that seems like pushing it.

2. A General Devices Pentium II server with UltraWide SCSI disk (9GB) and on-board RAID... need to get another drive to use the RAID, though. Maybe I'll get around to it, if I ever get anything on there that I really care about, so as to be able to do RAID 0 or something and always have a current backup. Or could do RAID 3 for REALLY FAST disk-striping reads/writes :-). That's all down the line. Right now, the only thing running on the box is lpd, which talks to:

3. An HP LaserWriter 6MP. Nice machine! Silent, 15w on standby. Warms up quick and really does 8ppm with 16MB of RAM installed. Toner is cheap, too, $70 at the local computer store in Winnemuca, and usually in stock. I'm using the postscript filter, though the thing does pcl as well. My laptop is set up to use the remote printer, and once I get my Mom's Windows box on the network too I'll install SAMBA on the server so she can print to it as well. Printing in Linux used to really be a bear to set up, but with Red Hat's printtool (which works fine on Debian, too, naturally) it's really a snap. The only slightly tricky thing was finding out that I needed to do an /etc/hosts.lpd file to permit network printer connections. The printer lives in the bottom part of the datacenter cart.

4. A nice little four-port Arlotto switch.

5. A technauts eServer.mail P166/2GB/128MB server appliance, a tiny little thing that I don't know what to do with, quite. I'm tempted to throw a 20GB laptop drive in it, install Debian and ext3 and do a music server/juke box/random mp3 radio station. I'm pretty sure sound works on it. And it has usb (though currently installed kernel is 2.0). Thus eventually I could connect to it with a portable mp3 player. It would be fun to play around with ice mp3 streamers some more. That was pretty fun stuff :-) . Or, I could leave it as configured, and set up some kind of email center, maybe administer mailing lists or something. That scares me though because of all the email security issues and the software being really out of date by now.

7. A wireless 900MHz telephone, handy for roaming around outside in the flower gardens while calling to find out when the DSL gets here! :-)

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