For all of us that run our own home labs we know (or should know) the price of what it costs us to run our equipment every month. Previously I spent some time with a Kill-A-Watt meter performing an energy audit on my equipment and found that it uses about 650 watt/hrs of power. At 12 cents per kwh I’m spending $78/month on my lab, over $900/year. 60% of our monthly electric bill goes towards my work hobby.
I’ve tried to slim some servers down by moving them to a laptop running Debian & VMware Server but there are creep-cpu-usage problems involved with that. The laptop running VMware Server wasn’t all the beefy either, a Athlon 2800+ with 512mb of RAM. 1 or 2 guest OSs before things start to slow down. No RAID setup, no firewire, no expandability; a good stop-gap system until I could figure out what I wanted to do.
Through a lot of reading I’ve decided that an VMware ESXi system was the way to go if I wanted to virtualize my servers and have enough room left over to delve into Cisco Call-Managers, IDS/IPS systems, Nessus scanners, Asterisk, Olive’s, and just stand alone systems for trying new things. I also needed a NAS to centralize all the usb/firewire drives that I have laying about. The NAS needed to have RAID capabilities and act as an iSCSI target so I’ve chosen to go with FreeNAS. Read more…
I’ve been able to trouble shoot and revamp CGI Perl code in my job that other people have written but never sat down and learned Perl well enough to write my own. Programming isn’t new to me. My first code was Basic like most peoples. Either drawing pixel images on my Commodore or simple text games on an Apple IIe. I’ve dabbled in BASH scripts a bit, mostly for parsing data or performing loop functions.
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Finished!
I had put my relay rack over the summer and slowly added parts to it. When I had to rewire the Cisco devices for study purposes or because I needed to change a computer out it was done with little regard to neatness (ie. sloppy is fast). I went from using the Costco special baker’s rack:
To a 7′ Chatsworth (that I got for free):
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So I received my routers that I won on Ebay and needed to update the IOS version from a 12.1 or 12.2 to the newest supportable 12.3. I had initially upgraded my 1900 switch from CATOS to IOS using X or Y-Modem via the console and even at 57600 it was painfully slow. My previous TFTP server is on my windows partition and with my wanting to put some distance between my myself and the need to rely on Windows I needed to find a Linux alternative. There are three different deb packages available for me to grab were Atftpd, Tftpd-hpa & Tftpd. After Atftpd didn’t work I tried Tftpd-hpa & Tftpd, neither of which were working for me either. Deciding to go back to Atftpd I started to do some trouble shooting and found in my Syslog:
Aug 9 19:14:40 [SERVER] atftpd[3879]: Advanced Trivial FTP server started (0.7)
Aug 9 19:14:40 [SERVER] atftpd[3879]: connect: Address family not supported by protocol
Aug 9 19:15:02 [SERVER] last message repeated 4 times
Aug 9 19:15:10 [SERVER] in.tftpd[3901]: connect from ::ffff:192.168.1.2 (::ffff:192.168.1.2)
Aug 9 19:15:10 [SERVER] atftpd[3901]: Advanced Trivial FTP server started (0.7)
Aug 9 19:15:10 [SERVER] atftpd[3901]: connect: Address family not supported by protocol
Aug 9 19:15:45 [SERVER] last message repeated 4 times
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It took a while to figure out how Apache uses tags… No matter what I seemed to do, whether I ordered the default site or a sub NameVirtualHost first, only 1 of the sites would come up. This is a fresh install of good ol’ Apache 1.3, PHP, Mysql. I ended up installing Bind for my Intranet to allow for absolute resolve across my network. That was just basic SysAdmin work, which was something that I was going to have to do eventually.
Now installing Jinzora was another.. MySql went fine and I decided to to try out the MySql Admin. Had to figure out that the default apt-get MySql did not turn on network listening, found it and turned it on. Now I can connect with MySql Admin and created a Jinzora user and give it all Data & Structure privileges. No matter what I did the Jinzora would not create the databases correctly. Turned up MySql logging and could see Jinzora issue the Create commands, etc. I ended up installing PhpMyAdmin, removing the Jinzora because none of the privs were actually there. Recreate the user and give it the privs and then copy & paste the SQL create statements to create the tables. Turns out that MySql does not like:
ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
Removing this from each SQL statement allowed the tables to be created successfully. No idea if this is a programming issue or that MySql 4.x doesn’t recognize this command.
Next step led me to import my mp3s and that worked like a breeze.
Next step will be to add an extra ethernet card to each server both Intra & Internet, create a vlan across the switch and figure out how to mount a drive across the network so I can install Jinzora on a public acl’d public server and be able to utilize the mp3s on the Intranet server.
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