Category Archives: Technology

ServerUnderground – Now virtualized!

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If you can read this, then I managed to not bungle the migration from physical hardware to a virtual machine.

The plan was to dump the database and set up the blog on a fresh install of Ubuntu server in a VM.  Instead, I used a utility called fsarchiver, which did a great job of backing up my primary partition on the physical box, and dumped onto a smaller partition on the VM.  Much less work!

Once the data was restored, I had to fix grub so it would boot from the virtual drive, and straighten out some networking issues outside of the VM environment.

The old box is powered down!

Change is in the air!

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Since there haven’t been any updates for a while, I figured it was time to sit down and write something.

2013 is proving to be an interesting year so far.  I have switched to a new job, with all kinds of pretty cool opportunities to expand my knowledge and experience using some new technologies, as well as honing my existing skill-set in a new environment.  Looking forward to what the rest of the year brings!

This past Black Friday’s trip to Fry’s Electronics yielded a new server for the basement.  I now have an eight-core AMD system, loaded with 32GB of RAM and a small software RAID array for local storage.  The new server is currently running Proxmox VE, and hosting a small set of virtual machines.  One of those VMs is actually my Zimbra server, which has been performing flawlessly, as well as much faster than the old physical box I used previously.

In other news, I have reacquired some domain names that I had originally registered back in 1999.  ServerUnderground is gaining a sister site, BurningServer!

BurningServer systems will be made up of my motley crew of SPARC based hardware running NetBSD.  I have to get the hardware sorted out, RAM purchased for those systems that were donated last summer, and storage set up.  It’s been pretty chilly in the basement lair this winter, so I haven’t spent a lot of time on this project yet.

Another project is to virtualize the web server currently dishing out content for this site.  I will attempt to load up a fresh VM running Ubuntu, and migrate the data over for the blog.  The older hardware will most likely be used for a NAS based off of FreeBSD so I can use ZFS.

I’m still a huge fan of the AMD Trinity line of processors!  After building the dual-core system, I ended up going all out and built a top of the line A10 based system with 16GB of RAM.  Super quiet, runs cool, and great support for the FGLRX driver under Ubuntu 12.10!

I hope to have more frequent updates on the blog in 2013 compared to last year.  That’s all for now!

Giving the AMD Trinity CPU+GPU a try!

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Initial thoughts on my new AMD Trinity based desktop:  Amazing for the money!

I just put together a system based on the AMD A4-5300 processor, ASRock FM2A75M-DGS mATX motherboard, 8GB of DDR3-1333Mhz RAM, and an Antec ECO 400W power supply.  Everything was from NewEgg, and very affordable.  This system was built using the slowest of the new AMD Trinity series of processors, and the cheapest AMD A75 chipset based motherboard I could find.

The goal was to load a Linux based operating system, and see how GPU performed under my most demanding graphical application:  Minecraft.

For less than $200 shipped (the power supply was on sale when I ordered), I was able to build a system using an existing case, hard drive, and monitor that will run Minecraft at 1920×1080 (full-screen) between 60 and 80 frames per second using Lubuntu 12.10, the “default-jre” package through Lubuntu, and the “fglrx” proprietary driver for the AMD graphics.  No other tweaks were made, and all the video settings were left to their defaults in Minecraft.

Neat.

So far, I am very impressed with the AMD Trinity system I put together for my tests.  The UEFI BIOS was very nice to work with, and even has the capability to configure the network interface via DHCP, fetch the latest BIOS version over the internet, download it, and update itself.  No operating system needed!

Lubuntu 12.10 runs like a dream.  All the hardware appears to be supported, and even without the “fglrx” graphics driver, the video worked perfect during the installation of Lubuntu, and after.  It was even quick enough to play Minecraft, but with some noticeable slowdown while running full-screen.

More updates to come as I mess around with this latest desktop systems architecture from AMD!

The End of an Era – Selling the Mac Mini!

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Tonight I finished cleaning all of my personal data off of my first Apple Macintosh.  The hard drive was wiped, and the operating system reload is in progress.  It’s time to put the little beastie up for sale, and get some more modern hardware!

This was a big purchase for me back when I started messing around with my Canon HF100 HD video camera.  iMovie ’09 worked great with my video camera, and it made sense to purchase a Mac Mini (and then upgrade it) to handle all of my video editing and storage duties.

The machine I purchased was a Mid 2007 Mac Mini, which had an Intel Core2Duo 2.0Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB internal hard drive.  I immediately upgraded the system to 4GB of RAM and installed a 500GB Western Digital 5400RPM SATA drive.  Massive improvements in speed, video editing capabilities, and storage in one easy afternoon.

The system has served me well as a workstation in general, and working with video through iMovie.  Sadly, the time has come to upgrade to something more modern, with a little more RAM and some more CPU power to handle the longer videos I’d like to shoot.  Also, the 500GB drive was full, and I’d rather not try to stuff a 1TB drive in the system.  External drives work great, but are much slower.  I have outgrown this system.

What will I get to replace this system?  I doubt I will get another Mac, since video editing capabilities under Linux have caught up to (and surpassed in some areas) iMovie, and i can get a LOT more storage space, CPU, and RAM by building my own system instead of paying for another Mac.  I’ve had a lot of success editing the raw files from my video camera under a couple different video editors in Linux, so I’m comfortable leaving the Mac behind at this point.

Not sure what the specs will be on the new system.  I have to sell off the Mac Mini first to help fund the new hardware.  That will be another blog post in the near future.  :-)