New bits for "old" computers [6]

The HDD bracket for serverpc arrived today so that is the opportunity to finish off this computer and bolt it to its shelf, all now complete. It was annoying that the expensive heavy brackets I bought from Mitre10 turn out not to be bent at a right angle, with the shelf drooping down more than 90 degrees, but a $5 bracket put underneath the shelf has lifted it up to be virtually level. I might add another bracket to ensure it stays that way. The biggest annoyance was the HDD adapter bracket that seems not to be able to fit into the drive bay, whether the holes are slightly out of line or something I didn't try to check, I just managed to get it in place and secured after a lot of fiddling.

As of now I still have to do just the shelf on top of the drawers. Which I guess will happen later this week.

Today the Unifi AP PRO seems to have gone on the blink and advertised itself as "Your New Wireless Network" instead of the correct name, but when I joined things up on this name, it changed to showing the correct name. Seems to be working properly now, but I am setting up a new VM to be a controller anyway. This one will be running Fedora, just to be different.

Fedora has a nice graphical installation, a cut above the Debian/Ubuntu ones, if you like pretty displays. I chose the XFCE desktop install, just to be consistent with everything else. Fedora was reasonably easy to set up and the ubiquiti controller was fairly straightforward once I obtained the fedora specific package for it. I don't actually need the controller right now but it will be there next time I need to reprogram the Unifi but it has to be adopted onto the controller first which is its own rigamarole so that can wait.

The K230 keyboard I use with serverpc has become a liability with a few issues surfacing unfortunately including repeated situations where the backtick just sticks down so I have ordered a replacement from Dove to come out by courier hopefully tomorrow, the old one will just have to be thrown away as I can't be bothered going back to globalpc to get it replaced. Hopefully it isn't a design fault, just a fault with that particular one.

New bits for "old" computers [5]

So serverpc is now complete with RAM and excluding the HDD bracket which should come on Monday. It proves to be quite capable of running 12 GB VMs for different versions of Qgis so that part of it looks OK. I have it installed with Debian 9.3 and not much more than Virtualbox at the moment to host the VMs.

For hosting backups it just looks like I will need to install the SSH daemon to host a remote repository which will let the computers connect to it. I need to do more work on this in coming weeks to see how well it will work.

It's been good to be testing Qgis 2.99 again without worrying about Mainpc running out of disk space for virtual machines and also be able to use three computers together to accomplish mapping tasks with six screens, better than trying to have three screens hooked onto one computer. For example I have been looking on one computer at video clips of the Taieri Gorge line, which I can step to the next frame without having to switch window on mainpc. This means I can easily keep the video clip in sync with the map on a different computer, especially as each computer has its own keyboard and mouse.

Whether I can RDP to a remote VM on serverpc and use it to do maps remains to be seen. My previous impression was that RDP clients are too limited in resolution to be as good as drawing directly on a canvas. With the nearest screen for serverpc being right to the side of the centre screen connected to mainpc this is probably not an issue anyway.

What remains to be done is to install the shelf that serverpc sits on. I have picked up some more bolts from the hardware shop and doing that, and the shelf on top of the drawer cabinet, are the things to be finished hopefully over the weekend. Reinstating some sort of shelf for drinking glasses is a possibility as well if the proposed solution involving the drawer cabinet isn't workable, and it seems it may not be, partly because of a risk of spilling onto the scanner if that is slid out.

serverpc currently has a logitech K230 compact wireless keyboard (and MS wireless mouse) attached to it, as well as the KVM cable to allow it to be controlled by the main keyboard and mouse that I use. This logitech keyboard seems to be to cope with being in close proximity to two other wireless logitech keyboards (all three of which are different models) and a MS multimedia wireless keyboard, as well as a Logitech wireless mouse and two MS wireless mice. However this keyboard seems to have a fault where pressing the Tab key results in the backtick key being pressed as well. I don't have the receipt to be able to prove it is faulty and needing return so it will just stay on this computer for now, since I can use the main keyboard as well. It only seems to affect using the tab key and not have issues with any other key.

New bits for "old" computers [4]

So I finished putting together the server last night, and then installed it. The motherboard SATA ports caused me enough concern to stop the assembly, and spend a little bit of time putting hot melt glue around them to reinforce them. Obviously this sort of activity will void your warranty, but since the board is unlikely to fail otherwise and it cost only about $100 to start with, I'd rather be working on the assumption that the SATA ports breaking off is much more of a concern than the unlikely event of an actual warranty component failure. It turns out all HDDs have a shroud on the top of their ports and the clips lock in, so I was wrong about that, but taking all the locking clips off the cables at the end that plugs into the MB was not enough to stop them flexing.

So it got powered up and I installed Debian 9.3 in UEFI mode, which I am starting to get used to. This is pretty easy to get the hang of; all you need is an extra partition, called the EFI System Partition, or ESP. This has to be between 100-200 MB in size, and formatted as FAT32, and set to bootable. On Linux you assign it the mount point /boot/efi. With that there on the SSD then it gets two more partitions as usual: the swap partition and the root partition mounted to /. After that the install went quite painlessly.

With the install complete after booting into Debian, it was time to set up the RAID array. I referred to my previous instructions, which is the reason I have them posted in this blog. The only real issue was assigning the wrong block ID in fstab to mount /home to, and logging on as myself instead of root (because my home folder is in the /home path). After fixing those issues, it mounted up properly and began syncing. Today when I turned it on, it starts resyncing straight away, which takes a while to complete for the first time. The disks seems to be OK despite their age, but they are server grade disks (RE3) rather than ordinary old WD Blacks. 

The server is sitting under the desk incomplete. I am just waiting for the RAM to turn up (today hopefully) and also the adapter bracket for mounting the SSD, which probably won't arrive until after the weekend. Neither of those things will hold me up from starting to use the server, but I have some other things to do anyway. One of those is to fix up the shelf it sits on, which as mentioned has to be lowered and reattached with new brackets onto the side of the desk. The other job waiting to be completed is to attach a shelf on top of the office drawer cabinet which sits to the right of the desk. This gets turned round 90 degrees to face me, and the shelf will increase the space on top of it from 500x500 to 600x800 by using two 600x400 melamine shelves I have left over. So the area just about doubles. The shelf will be attached using the "tee nuts" and 6 mm bolts I got from Mitre 10 Mega, rather than screwing it in place as I usually would.

Then of course there is setting up the server itself, I am not sure when that happens, but I guess I will be using it next week. I am surprised how quiet it is, I guess the Powerman PSU in this Inwin chassis is quieter than some of the older ones I have used. But I have given up on Enermax because their low end supplies aren't quiet like they used to be; the one I got for the mediapc is the noisiest of all the computers I have here. Apart from the fact that the original one I got from Dove died after only a few days use and had to be returned under warranty.

New bits for "old" computers [3]

So since writing last my main achievement has been to complete the Windows 10 PC, and put it in its little corner, along with building the sliding shelf for the scanner to sit on directly above. This means I now have what I needed the most, a scanner that is much easier to access because the shelf it sits on is much lower down, making it easier to lift the lid all the way up, and on a sliding shelf it can be pulled out when needed and slid away when not in use.

If you ever end up wanting to make a sliding shelf with drawer runners (such as a sliding keyboard shelf) the trick which makes them easiest to set up prior to installation is to attach each rail to right angle brackets and then screw the horizontal end of each pair of brackets onto a cross piece made of wood. You then attach the cross piece to the desk, or in this case, using another set of right angle brackets, to the vertical sides of the cabinet the shelf sits inside. The key that makes it really easy is to fully set up the runners with the brackets onto the cross pieces and get the whole thing working before you finally mount it to the desk or cabinet or whatever. So you can get all the runners and rails properly aligned and running smoothly whilst it is still sitting on your work bench. This is far easier than trying to align everything under the desk, which in fact is near lethal if you have to lie on your back and try to hold everything in place while you put in the screws. In fact I near brained myself more than once trying to do this with a previous shelf because it kept falling out because I needed four hands instead of two. Because of having used this system this time the shelf works much better than the last scanner shelf I made, which although it was easy to install at just above floor level, with the side of the desk on one side and a couple of vertical posts on the other, never did work smoothly because of misalignment.

The stack in an old cabinet (which, in fact, used to be a set of drawers bolted underneath the same side of this very desk, not sitting on the floor as now) that has the computer at the bottom and the scanner on top. Look closely and you can see the R/A brackets that attach to the drawer runners, the cross piece of wood, and the brackets attaching the cross piece to the cabinet. Right at the top is another sliding shelf, in this case carrying the MS multimedia keyboard that is permanently plugged in to this computer. For serious work I have a four way KVM plugged into all of the computers that lets me share my main keyboard and mouse with any one of them. Each computer has its own displays - they don't share any.

The next step is to set up the "server". This is another pile of work that only starts with assembling the new chassis. Along the way I have only just realised I need a 2.5" to 3.5" drive bay adapter for the SSD because this time around one wasn't shipped in the package. So temporarily the drive is mounted with one single screw into the side of a 3.5" bay. 

The chassis with the board installed. The board looks tiny inside the mid tower chassis. The bay swung out at right will hold the two HDDs that make up the RAID-1 array. The big bright blue cable is the USB3 backplane bracket adapter that lets me use the onboard USB3 connector for something. However the days are gone when I had one computer with about 12 USB ports on it (I have a 4 port PCIe x1 adapter card as well) because I had only one or two computers and a large number of USB devices. This was the case when my main PC was running Windows because everything had to plug into it: the scanner, the printer, and all the different camera cables and the keyboard, mouse and display USB hub. For various reasons partly because of having boards with more USB ports on them and partly having more computers, six or eight on the back is enough.

So the assembly of the server continues. There are a few more parts to go into the chassis and then it can be powered up and Debian installed. I need that HDD adapter and the extra RAM to finish it, but it will be closer to completion. The shelf it attaches to is a bit of work to adapt as it has to be lowered and new brackets bolted to the side of the desk to hold it in place.

One thing that is annoying about modern SATA cables is the trend for them all to have retaining clips fitted. These only work on the motherboard connectors which have a shroud fitted that the clip locks into, because the HDD has no such shroud. I have found them annoying on MBs because the clip can be hard to release which puts strain on the connector. In the process of taking this board out of the last chassis the strain on the SATA connectors has been too much in my opinion; they aren't particularly solidly attached to the board and could break off if they get flexed too much. So all the SATA cables in this chassis are going to have the retention clips taken off one end. If the HDD can get by without these clips so can the MB.

New bits for "old" computers [2]

The next step in redoing things with computers 3 and 4 has been to strip out the Inwin mini tower chassis and put the mini ITX board (GA-E350) into it for the Windows computer. When I switched the disks over, with the same type of board as the Antec chassis, Windows didn't notice any hardware change. It seems it can only detect a different type of board, not a different serial number of the same board. 

The next job was to transfer Windows itself from the 2.5" laptop HDD which is what the Antec chassis takes, to a regular 3.5" desktop disk. After trying various solutions, the best one I have encountered is Clonezilla, which is a full bootable image tool based on Debian. Simply download the ISO image, flash it to a pen drive, and boot the computer from it. No real tweaking was needed, it was simply configured to clone all of the partitions on the source disk, to the target disk.

Once again on rebooting, this time on the 3.5" disk, Windows 10 came up as expected, with no activation issues, and everything of course right there just as it was before. The irony being this Windows 10 PC is back in the same mini tower chassis albeit with a much lower power motherboard than was the case before, and the last time it was in this chassis was as Windows 10 Enterprise with a volume license key, instead of being the home retail edition as it now is with a license key I have purchased. 

So the next step is to reassemble that chassis and then move it to its new location under the desk on the right hand side, ready to go as the occasionally used Windows 10 computer in the household. The server is the next job. Right now all I have is a bare chassis, which has the fittings attached to the base, but it needs to be cleaned inside and out before I start installing stuff into it. It will have 1 TB of disk in RAID-1 for data, a 128 GB SSD for OS and swap, and 16 GB of RAM which will let it run Qgis VMs well for mapping testing.

New bits for "old" computers

As of today the new SSD for the bedroom PC (NUC) and the one for the "server" have arrived. The NUC has now got the SSD installed and Xubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) installed on it and the video clips now being downloaded over the wireless from the mediapc. The difference in sound level is quite notable as at night with the thing idling the HDD whine was very obvious, it also shows up that the NUC must have a very quiet cooling fan fitted. 

The "server" project was mentioned previously. Since writing that, I have decided to rebuild it into a full size Inwin desktop tower using my stock of these ex HCS which I obtained as their older desktops were retired. The shelf it sits on under the desk therefore needs to be lowered to accommodate the additional height but the main advantage of this chassis is more HDD bays internally and better access to them should a disk need to be replaced. This chassis will have a 128 GB SSD installed as the new boot disk and I am still considering the addition of another 8 GB of RAM to make it more useful if I can afford the cost. The shelf instead of having three brackets bolting it onto the desk below, will have two much more substantial brackets bolted to the side of the desk above it.

The existing Inwin mini tower the "server" components are installed in will then become the chassis for the Windows PC which will be removed from the Antec ISK110 case. This will fit under the other side of the desk in the space where the printer currently sits, side on. A shelf is going to be put above the computer which will slide out on drawer rails and this will be for the scanner which will make it much easier to use because of the limited access under the desk with the keyboard tray for that computer above it. The shelf will be one of the 600x400 melamine shelves I currently have, which will have to have about 40 mm trimmed off one side.

The Antec ISK110 chassis could then be used with the other mini-ITX board I currently have as a small Linux server. I am currently looking at what sort of things I could use it for, possibly a small comms server for school productions is an option with the free edition of 3CX running on Debian. I would have to get hold of a few spare phones for this.

The printer is getting moved and it will sit on top of the office drawer unit which at the moment sits at the end of the desk. An extension top will be bolted onto the top of these drawers being another 600x400 melamine shelf using what are called "Tee Nuts" which is a nut that can be made captive by hammering it into the hole, whereby it has shoulders with pointed tips that penetrate the wood and lock it into place. A regular bolt is then bolted through from the other side. This is much more preferable than using regular screws. The shelf apart from the printer will also carry the fan or heater which sits on this side of the desk and drinking glasses.

The use of other storage in the living room is still being considered, in particular the pigeonholes in the big cupboard, having moved that from the left side to the right side of the desk. I need to figure out the best use of this space and whether to keep some of the computer related stuff out in the sleepout. I feel sure the space in this cabinet can be better utilised, at present I have yet to store everything in it but don't want to pile stuff in and then discover it fills up too quickly.

The future of my collections of photos is one of the reasons for making the scanner more accessible. I am seriously looking at getting rid of the photos to the NZRLS archives and in order to make it easier for them I would be scanning them first, as they are currently underway with a project to scan their entire collection. This would let me keep a copy of the photos electronically for any future use I have for them, while freeing up the several boxes they currently sit in. Although the space of those boxes is not great, it does help to reduce the overall clutter in the house.

Another storage issue is having got rid of the filing cabinet, I still have files, so storing these will have to be solved in future. I have had a look at various plastic boxes that have rails fitted for files, as well as a smaller filing cabinet (than the one I got rid of). At the moment all the files are piled up out in the sleepout and finding an ideal way to store them is another goal for reducing clutter as I can't see a better way of storing the contents.

Linux "server"

So linux PC #3 at my desk is going to become a server of sorts. Backup server for borg is one of the key roles it can do. Another one is Virtualbox server or PC running vboxes natively, depending on how I set it up. Another way of working around disk space limitations on MainPC without spending a lot (or virtually any) money. 

I have a pile of old disks lying around and there should be enough WD Blacks or REs to give it a 1 TB RAID-1 array with mdadm without it costing me anything. However it has only 8 GB of RAM which isn't really enough for its new role. The memory from the other computers isn't likely to be compatible with it and memory is expensive (this motherboard only has two memory slots which is an unusual choice for me, but the PC was expected to have a low usage when I built it and cost was important). I would have to decide whether to put 8 GB or 16 GB extra into it, but 8 is much more likely, but too much to pay for at present.

It will run Debian, but a desktop version with GUI for the present time. For borg it will be able to act as a server to back up the other two PCs on this desk which have all the stuff stored on them (which adds up to a lot of stuff) and the backup disks can be optimised by having stuff from both PCs stored on them.

Linux backup solutions

So since I started to use Linux I have used rsync as a backup system. This has some limitations, and this week I decided to see if there is an actual backup solution. Well it turns out there are a number of FOSS backup packages to choose from. As usual the Gnome one (sbackup) isn't being maintained currently like so many Gnome Desktop packages. Fortunately I found BorgBackup which comes in the Debian repositories and seems to be a good package that is well supported.

There was some drama when I tried to update my system to the 1.1.4 edition of Borg. Because I tried using a sid package instead of looking to see if there was a stretch backport, a lot of the dependencies for qgis and some other software got trashed in the process. So I had to reinstall MainPC twice. However reinstallation is something I have got down to a fine art and can be completed in a couple of hours including all the application software packages. One of the reasons that makes it straightforward is that the home drive is on a separate disk (actually a RAID-1 disk array) from the install volume (which is an SSD). So reinstalling is just a matter of setting up the SSD as the / mount point and installing there, and then reconnecting the RAID array and bringing that back up as /home. 

So I have spent the evening reinstalling but as usual it has been straightforward and trouble free and at least I have the latest edition of Borg. The first backup took up much less disk space than rsync backups did and because of the deduplicator built into it, subsequent backups will be fairly small. This means much more efficient disk space usage. After due consideration borg will be the backup software for both mainpc and mediapc, and I am sure it will do a great job.