Being a bit of a nerd – and couple it with not wanting to pay for software.  Linux fitted into to my world quite nicely.  At the beginning, I tried downloading versions of RedHat which took an age (usually had multiple CDs to download), then to run through the installation instructions line by line to be met with often obscure discrepancy errors which spiralled exponentially.  Missing packages which were required to install the OS would need to be downloaded and installed before the OS would install.

Early Linux installation nightmare

It would take hours and hours of downloading extra packages – often I had no idea what they were.

I learnt the process of Linux installations using VMWare running on a laptop – over the years, Linux has got better and better.  I settled on Ubuntu about 6 years ago and have never looked back.

I purchased a Dell Poweredge 2500 from Ebay for £100

Dell Poweredge 2500

It came with an 18GB SCSI Hard drive and 1GB of RAM.  I popped a PCI SATA host card into it and installed an old 500GB Hard drive which I wanted to use as a network storage device (a home made NAS).  I ran with this for a number of years running Ubuntu Server Edition (no GUI).  Here’s a list of what I use it for:

  VTiger CRM Open Source CRM system

 VirtualBox Open Source virtualisation

  Fuppes – Open Source UPnP Entertainment Service

 MySQL – Open Source Database

 Apache Web Server

 Samba File and Print Sharing Service

 Open SSH – Secure Shell

 

What do I need it for?

Well as a nerdy type of guy I like to have gadgets around the house, as well as being able to access data easily from any of them.  I have an office with a desktop, have a laptop sitting on the arm of my sofa – so I can surf and work while with my family, I have a tablet and an iPhone for use in bed or anywhere else in the house.  We have a PS3, a Wii and a Internet connected Sony BDP-S370 Blu-Ray player.

The goal is to have access to the web from anywhere in the house – the house got wired with CAT5E in all of the main rooms when we moved in.  I have ADSL2 coming into the house in the cupboard under the stairs where I also located the Dell Server.  Connection is made with a Draytek Vigor 2820 router – I also still have the Draytek Vigor 2600+ ADSL Router which I have located in our bedroom.  This extends the wireless signal using Draytek’s WDS Mode using the Repeater function.

I run the business from home and so have customers making enquiries and I am not tied to any device.  I use the VTiger CRM system to create invoices and add customer lead details.

VirtualBox hosts 1x Windows 2003 Server to give me access to an IIS hosted system so that I can work on Classic ASP based web sites and Web apps.

Fuppes hosts all MP3, AVI, MP4, JPG files and allows playback through the PS3, iPhone, Tablet, Desktop and laptops.  The Sony BDP-S370 Blu-Ray stated that it supported uPNP and despite various updates still does not find the server.  WinAmp is my chosen media player for the desktop – which I play the music through a Mapped drive rather than using the uPNP (sometimes called DLNA) service.

MySQL is great for creating databases for websites – VTiger CRM actually uses it.  It’s very easy to create locally and then transfer the database to your web host once it is ready.  I use HeidiSQL  as a local Windows client software which is so easy to use.

The Ubuntu server also runs Apache with PHP 5 which hosts the VTiger CRM web site as well as allowing me to work on PHP and WordPress based sites locally before uploading them to the web.

OpenSSD is just used to connect to the Ubuntu Server through Putty so that I don’t have to get up to go look at the server.

Samba enables Ubuntu to share folders so that you can map drives on your Windows PCs or Places on your other Ubuntu PCs.  I use Windows 7 Ultimate in the office as it runs Pro-Tools (Digital Audio Workstation), as well as MS Office (I use Access to keep track of all of the Future Storage products, prices etc).  Ubuntu sits on my laptop in the living room as well as the wife’s Samsung NC10 (did run XP but it got too damn slow and crashed a lot) – I suggested Ubuntu and she has never looked back – she surfs the web, uses GMail for email and SKYPE to talk to her parents back in Taipei.  It all works perfectly and has never ever crashed.

We store all of our kids photos, video clips on the network as well as our own PCs.

Enhancements

The Dell Poweredge 2500 Server was great – but the noise and heat it kicked out was staggering.  I never even looked at how much power it used.  I ran it 24/7 for over 2 years – never even rebooted it.  I think we had a power cut once and it came back up without any issues when power was resolved.

According to Dell it uses a 300W PSU – to calculate the cost of running this 24/7 I found http://www.dslreports.com/faq/2404 so

“The average PSU in a computer will operate at
about 80% efficiency due to the nature of the circuits employed. This means that for
the PSU to deliver 300W (va) as rated then it will actually draw about 375W (375va)”

P = 300W

V = 240V

In = P / V = 1.25A draw

Power used at maximum (Pmax) = 375va
So now calculate the total power used in 24 hours,
P(max) * 24hrs = 375 * 24 = 9000va or 9000W (9Kva or 9Kw)

I switched to Eon who are now charging me 24.381p per Kwh then 12.348p after I have used 900Kwh (100 days of the Poweredge 2500 running – before the 2nd tarrif applies) £219.43 for 100 days + £111.13 for the remaining 265 days Total = £330.56 for the year.

The 500GB drive inside was getting a bit full, and I decided that the heat and noise as well as power consumption was just too much – it was expensive and wasteful, even though I did not calculate the extent of this (I will hopefully see the difference when my electricity bills come through). 

I purchased a Patriot Valkyrie

as well as 2x 2TB SATA 3.5inch HDDs – I removed the 500GB drive from the Dell Poweredge 2500 Server and put it into a USB caddy – plugged it into the USB port on the front of the Patriot device.

This NAS group of disks are setup from the browser – and I have 2 devices available for mapping.  I duplicated the priceless photos, music collection (not priceless but would be a pain if I lost it), video clips from the now USB drive to the Patriot NAS.  The USB drive is now effectively a backup drive and can be switched off – I can manually go and turn it back on and backup new data to it each week or month.  It does have a uPNP (DLNA) Server built in – but in my opinion it just doesn’t work very well.  The artists appear in a deep folder structure that you can’t really control very well.  If you add a new artist or album, it’s tricky to get it to update and you can only have either MP3s or Videos or Photos at a time – Fuppes accommodates them all at once, the folders are as they are on the drive.

The Patriot makes virtually no noise and I expect it to use a lot less power than the 2500.

We have an MSI Wind laptop.  It’s very light and small – it has a Chinese layout on the keyboard, but I can still use it (it also has UK keys)

 

The Green Bit

I built this with a dual boot Ubuntu Workstation and Windows XP (I still may use this for music making) – I turned the Ubuntu OS (with GUI) into a server by installing all of the above software onto it, therefore replacing the Dell Poweredge 2500 server.

Not only does this little laptop use a lot less power, generates virtually no heat or sound (certainly in comparison to the Dell Poweredge 2500) it also allowed me to set the MSI Laptop to hibernate off every 2 hours.  Therefore using a lot less power and becoming a bit more green.

Of course the Patriot is left on 24/7 as well as the USB drive (which also has it’s own power). 

Both the MSI Wind and USB Drive’s power supplies state 20V output – and 2Amps – volts x amps = watts so they draw 40 Watts each when running.

The Patriot idles at 17 Watts and climbs to 20 Watts when copying files.

So I have reduced the power from a 300 Watt PSU to around 100 Watts and turning the USB drive off and hibernating the MSI Wind, reduces this further to around an average of 70Watts per hour.  I would therefore expect a £200 saving over a year on electricity charges, as well as doing my bit for the environment.

Tweaks

The thing about hibernating – Ubuntu does this easily – from the GUI – System – Preferences – Power Management – WOL is fully supported.  I set the Ubuntu hibernate option to 1 hour (max is 2 hours) and set it at exactly 4pm. It’s fine to have it do that but a little inconvenient when I am working and every 1 hour of inactivity I have to send a Wake On Lan packet to wake it up.

I expect I can setup a Cron job in Ubuntu to wake it up every xx:01 minutes during the day – but what I’d rather do is have my Windows PC send it a wake up every 1:01 minutes.

Here’s the thing about Wake On LAN.  Send it a packet when it is not asleep, and nothing happens.  The system does not realise that you don’t want it to sleep on it’s next closure – it does not reset the clock – the Wake On Lan only responds if it is asleep.

I have created a Batch file in Windows and placed wol.exe into c:\batch folder – the batch file is called WOL.bat and it’s contents are

WOL 0223769C261D  ‘*see note’
echo "Packet Sent"

*Note suggests my MAC Address of my MSI Wind Network card – I have changed it on here through web paranoia

Wake On Lan Windows Executable

I’ve added the echo “Packet Sent” line so that when the batch file runs each hour in my Windows Scheduled task – I add the option >wol.txt – this writes the output of the command to the text file so that I can see if it worked. 

Here’s the problem – if I logon to the Ubuntu box and use it – the time of 1 hour is reset.  If I logon at 16:56 – and the WOL.bat then runs at 17:01 – it will have no effect.  The Ubuntu laptop will then hibernate at 17:56 and wont get a new WOL.bat packet to awaken it till 18:01 (at which point it will awaken the Ubuntu server).

In reality – this potential 5 minute downtime – should not really cause me much of an issue.  My mapped drives to it’s Samba shares will go offline for these 5 minutes.

There may well be better ways – If I can find out how to have the Ubuntu server detect traffic and automatically wake itself – that would be the holy grail of Wake On Lan.

iPhone Wake On LAN

Here’s the cool bit – If I go to bed and decide to listen to the latest Bon Iver album which I have already put onto my NAS Music folder and updated Fuppes – I need to send a Wake On Lan packet from bed.  There are a few free WOL apps in Apple’s Store that you enter the MAC address and hit send (the app I use is called iWol)

 iWol iphone App

I send the packet – the server wakes up and I get an hour of use before it hibernates.

I’d welcome any advise on how to stop the hibernation should Fuppes be active, or a drive is mapped in Samba, etc etc.

 Plug Player iPhone App – uPNP (DLNA) media player connects to Fuppes