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.