A silent Octane

She has new fans. Now she is enough quiet to work near the table!!!!!

Unfortunately I thing I was wrong ordering the Sharkoon 120mm fan, the Octane needs more power in this fan. Oufff. New fan will be ordered next week because now the air is getting hot after 30 minutes of run. The 92mm fan is OK and this is the good thing because this was the noisy one!!!

Nothing more today

Titox.

PD: How slooooowwwwww is Firefox in Irix!!!!!!! A lot of time wasted to write this post!!!

Silencing

Hello.
Today arrived at home a new packet with a lot of fans. First I ordered two new fans for the Octane2 and small ones for the Extrem Networks switch and Gigabyte server. In th switch I changed the three original Delta Electronics fans by slow and quiet Sharkoon S402030L-3. This new fans run at only 3000 rpm with 16 dB(A) of noise.... With the switch running you hear anything!!!!! This new fans take out small air quantity but the switch is placed outside a datacenter - in my room!!!!-, and with the small amount of machines running over there, It isn't needed to take out a lof air -That room is not ver heat-.

Maybe tomorrow I'll upload some pictures. The only special thing that I did is to change the wires in the fan plug as the original fans have.

At the end I replaced the Octane PSU fan for a new quiet Sharkoon one but after a lot of work done (nearly 30 bolts out and then returned in place), the fan doesn't turn :(
Today I'm too tired to check it again.... tomorrow perhaps.

See you.

New BitTornado

Using Torrentflux with BitTornado from a long time, I always had problems downloading big torrents. I never had been able to download any linux distribution via the BitTorrent network and this is a big trouble for me. In files bigger than 3 GB's, like Fedora or Solaris installation DVD's, always I had a "Torrent died" messahe whe the download reached near 2,5 GB's. And everytime I tried to restart the server returned a bad "Torrent died" after checking the existing data. I deleted the downloaded part but nothing went better.

Now I'm working 600 Km from my home but yesterday nigth I had the same problem, then I deleted the file partially downloaded I tried to restart de download but TorrentFlux said the same and I decided to search some information. The TorrentFlux website says nothing about upgrades and nothing related in the its forums. Then I went to the BitTornado webpage I there is a new release: 0.3.18.

The release information doesn't say anything about bug fixes, only encryption upgrade but happiness now I can restart my failed download. Only some days waiting for to see if I have a good end of my torrent file.

To upgrade BitTornado I downloaded the .tar.gz file in my laptop, uncompressed it and moved to the server the files used by TorrentFlux: two files .py in the TFBitTornado folder and then all the CVS folder. Then I rebooted the server.

Nothing more today, I need hollidays... too much work now...

Maybe the problem is my server. The Cobalt RaQ 4 is running the old CobaltOS and needs update to CentOS + BlueQuartz... I'll see.

One month later... One more RaQ4

OK. I have a lot of work in my job and I can't dedicate a lot of time to my servers but... I can't be quiet. I bid on one more Cobalt RaQ 4i two weekends ago and it came here last friday. The seller said it has no hard disk and a lot of screws were lost. He didn't guarantee that te Cobalt runs but after installing an old Maxtor 40Gb, I installed the Cobalt software without problems. The best of all is This new RaQ had been very very cheap!!!!!

First I installed the Zeffies special restore CD and his Turbo Updates but some of the packages didn't want to install and this restore CD only detects 8GB-more or less- of the 40GB disk. Later I was thinking how this machine can serve files via SMB and I decided to install the Qube3 OS. Oohhhhh! This OS is beatiful and I think it is a lot faster then the old one.

I like the BlueLinq update system but it has a big fault: There is not a button to install everything with only one press, and I spent one day installing packages. Oh yes, the package Qube3-All-Security-4.0.1-17041 don't want to install.

Now I have a lot of work playing with this new software but I'm thinking to use this as first server and use the other Cobalt RaQ 4i as development system.

Here you have a picture of my servers - Ouch, yes, I have a new Extreme Networks switch-. maybe the next thing to do is find a place for all, a cabinet perhaps?

Finally, I have a Solaris machine

Yesssss. Here it is. A Sunfire V120 arrived last week. I spent all the weekend installing and configuring Solaris 10 and the Java Web Server.

My first idea was to run this machine as redirector or Reverse Proxy but it's noisy as the my Gigabyte server... I have to buy a lot of new slow fans!!!!

After the installation of the last release of Solaris 10 for Sparc I'm very impressed with the Sun webserver software, the configuration page via web site is fantastic and it has a wide quantity of options to configure the server. But there is a new things to learn and I need some time to know how works this server software.

In the other hand, the Webconsole software -included in the Solaris package- is really a good idea but now I can only manage ZFS and I don't need it. I'm going to install the Webmin Solaris package and try.

I have to say Solaris is more different from linux than I was thinking, big diferences in console commands and file structures makes me headaches to find some configuration files and, the installation path of some applications are very inconsistent: I have the webserver on /sun/webserver7/, and the webconsole in /usr/share/webconsole/. The freeware of the Companion DVD is in another place and I can't remember everything. Maybe with some work.....

Also, I miss some usefull tools from linux like wget. I downloaded it from ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/ but after installation I received a message saying I need some libraries to get it running. This is not a big trouble but some extra work is needed to do some jobs that were very easy with the linux of my Cobalt Raq. Maybe Solaris has it's own tools for the same job but I can't find any list of the equivalent commands and the existance of some freeware makes me doubt about the existance of this list itself.

Here you have some pictures of this hard weekend:

My Intranet DNS server

My home network is growing fast now with new servers, old PC's and new workstations. Now, I can't remember all my IP addresses and with Unix systems I can't use smb names. The solutions is easy and widely discussed: I need a DNS server.


The machine to runs DNS is easy to choose: my Cobalt RaQ4 is 24/7 up. The procedure is easy, and you can download the RaqTweak.com HOWTO. In my case, due this is a local network I simplified a lot the configuration.


Log in the admin panel and go to the Control Panel:


Click on the DNS Server Parameters to open the configuration screen and select Server Settings. Type your usual DNS servers, ask your DSL provider if don't know, as Forwarders servers. Our new intranet DNS server will redirect us to that servers in case of an Internet address translation.

Then select Address (A) record in the combo box and type the name you want for the network item and the domain name, here I use only home as domain name:

Now you only need to repeat this procedure with all the addresses of the net to access to them with names like router.home, webserver.home or films.home. Remember to add the ip address of your new DNS server to the network configuration of your computers, or better, put this in your DHCP server or router.

The next thing I need is a Reverse Proxy and some kind of ssh redirector because I have more than 2 webservers in my net and I need to access to them from everywhere without a VPN.

Upgrading Python

Looking at the Torrentflux requisites there is one that a full upgraded Cobalt OS 6 doesn't have: Python release 2.2 or greater. The OS of a Cobalt RaQ 4 only has Python 1.5.3. I don't know why but I downloaded Python 2.2.3 sources (maybe I can use a newer release, I'll try later) from the Python RPM page. I downloaded the Redhat special version.

This time not tar zxvf, the command is rpm -i python-2.2.3-26.src.rpm, and then the sources must be located in the /usr/src/redhat/sources/Python-2.2.3 folder. You know... change to that folder and be root: cd /usr/src/redhat/sources/Python-2.2.3, then type su and intro the root/admin password.

After this you can do the usual compilation/installation from sources:

1 ./configure

2 ./make

3 ./make install

Now the executable is /usr/local/bin/python. In the case of the Cobalt OS we need this file in /usr/bin: cd /usr/local/bin, cp python2.2 /usr/bin/python2.2, cd /usr/bin, cp python2.2 python. The last command overwrites the old executable (it remains as python1.5).

The last thing to do is reboot the server and ...... voilà.