[cumbria_lug] Hardware / Linux Pictures

Sun Feb 20 00:58:06 GMT 2005

Just a little "show and tell" post about some of the stuff I've been up to 
so far this year Linux related.

IMAP...
Recently I have started to require accessing my email while away from my 
desk, rather then logging into my computer remotely and using pine I 
decided to move from a mbox format of mail to Maildir and setup IMAP.

I currently have a local IMAP server that "pops off" email from my 
different accounts every 5mins, I can then sync with this IMAP server using 
just about any computer / system and access my email effortlessly.

This week I have been traveling to and from London to do some work, while 
on the train I was able to keep up to date and on top of work by syncing my 
laptop with the IMAP server at home over GPRS!

I currently have approximately 50,000 emails, I am using dovecot as the 
IMAP server, its running on a low spec system: EPIA 800MHz, 256M RAM, 
2x60GB HDD running RAID1.

You can see a picture here:
http://lantyland.co.uk/other/pictures/2005-01-14/100_0419.JPG

File Server...
Over the last few months I started to "collect" a nice pile of Seagate 
hard drives that had died on me, because Seagate extended there warranty 
to 5 years not so long ago I thought I'd try sending them back for 
replacements... to my surprise even some drives that were several years old 
were replaced with new reconditioned drives!

I now had the following drives sitting idle:
2 x 200GB
4 x 120GB

My current file server (120GB) was always getting full, every few months 
I was burning stuff to DVD as I could no-longer keep it on the file 
server, now because I had 6 drives sitting doing noting I decided to build 
a new file server.

I found enough spare parts to assemble a small server, P3 500MHz, 128M RAM.

The 200GB drives were split into 4 partitions...
1 x 5GB partition, RAID
1 x 256M partition, SWAP
1 x 70GB partition, RAID
1 x 110GB partition, RAID

The 5GB and 70GB partitions on the two 200GB drives have been setup in a 
RAID 1 array, the 5GB partition is used for the OS and the 70GB is used as 
/home

The 120GB drives were split into 1 partition...
1 x 110GB partition, RAID

I used the 110GB partitions on the four 120GB drives along with the 110GB 
partitions on the 200GB drives in a RAID5 array.

This gives me 550GB of usable space.

The reason I did not use the full capacity on all the drives is to allow 
room for maneuvering in the future, if I ever have to replace a drive in 
the arrays I will not run into the problem of having one drive a very 
small amount bigger or smaller then the current drives.

Considering the RAID1 and RAID5 arrays are all done by Linux the 
performance is far faster then expected...

root at visualise:~# hdparm -tT /dev/md2

/dev/md2:
  Timing buffer-cache reads:   1216 MB in  2.00 seconds = 608.00 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads:  184 MB in  3.03 seconds =  60.73 MB/sec

root at visualise:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0              4.8G  901M  3.9G  19% /
/dev/md1               67G   33M   67G   1% /home
/dev/md2              530G  226G  304G  43% /mnt/storage

I didn't have a case big enough to fit in all the drives so I had to mount 
the system onto some wood and build something for the drives to be mounted 
onto!

You can see some pictures here:
http://lantyland.co.uk/other/pictures/2005-01-14/100_0421.JPG
http://lantyland.co.uk/other/pictures/2005-01-14/100_0422.JPG
http://lantyland.co.uk/other/pictures/2005-01-14/100_0423.JPG
http://lantyland.co.uk/other/pictures/2005-01-14/100_0425.JPG

Since taking them pictures the P3 has been replaced with a 2200+ AMD 
Sempron as I was only able to get 10Mbit Half-Duplex out of the network 
card on the old system, some how the motherboard was effecting the network 
card from functioning at full speed. Needless to say a file server on a 
10Mbit Half-Duplex link is very very slow! Once upgrading the system I 
have never had any problems.

The next stage is to find a case big enough to support all the drives and 
have room for expansion!

New servers...
As I said above, I have recently been in London, this was to install some 
new networking equipment and servers for my company, there's no much to 
say about this but I thought some of you may like to see some pictures :)

http://firestorm-games.net/images/london/2005-02-17/101_0461.JPG
http://firestorm-games.net/images/london/2005-02-17/101_0462.JPG
http://firestorm-games.net/images/london/2005-02-17/101_0463.JPG
http://firestorm-games.net/images/london/2005-02-17/101_0464.JPG

I hope some of you found at least part of this email interesting, its not 
often I post :¬)

Kind Regards
Luke Antins