I present to you one of the projects that I have been working on for the past year. When I moved in and started fixing up my (new to me) house I found a 1950’s coke machine left out in the back yard (There was a lot of random junk out there). It took me a while to figure out what to do with it, but once I decided I wanted a video arcade room in my house, I knew exactly what to do. It turned out to be the perfect size to fit a custom tailored server rack! Below you will find pictures of the build process. You could always skip to the bottom to see the finished product, but where’s the fun in that?
My fileserver has an SSH server, so I’ve always been able to remotely connect to it via WinSCP. Recently this has gotten a bit tedious because I would have to wait for a file to finish downloading on my client before I could use it. Recently I finally went through the trouble of figuring out a better way. Since I’ve been using Virtualbox with an Ubuntu virtual machine I figured that I could mount my remote directory via SSHFS in the virtual machine and then share it out via a samba server to my “host” machine running windows. This would allow me to securely (and relatively easily) get native(ish) mounting in windows. I’m going to assume that you’ve worked with some of that stuff before, so I’ll skip the step-by-step.
Earlier this week I had a motherboard die on my primary file server. This was an inconvenience, but not of terrible concern because of my (tested) backup and recovery plan. Throughout the entire ordeal, I didn’t lose even a single file. I did, however face a few interesting challenges.
I kept a server on the same rack ready to go as a cold spare. To use it I would simply disconnect the hard drives from one system and plug them in to the new system. All of the software was already configured. This was a good plan, except that in the year since I put it in place the SATA add-on card had died, so the spare system wasn’t useable. Lesson learned: Check your systems at least every now and then, not just once.
After a long time without updates, I am now getting to the point where I am comfortable with the idea of posting detailed(ish) updates again. I’ve been working with my friends for the past year on the 6800 project and because of this have not had much time to work on my truck. I thought I would post this quick update to show that, yes, things are still moving forward. The truck now has a space between my shed and the house, as well as having its own 20 amp electrical circuit.
As you may have noticed, I’ve been rather quiet over the past several months. That is because I’ve been spending the vast majority of my time on a somewhat unique project. I haven’t mentioned this project much on the public internet because I didn’t want to start the project with extremely high expectations and then never post about the work being done. However, after starting this project at the end of May 2010 my friends and I have come a long way. My goals are in sight and progress is being made every day.
Rest assured that there will be write-ups and many photos from throughout the process. And yes, I am being very vague.
For now I’ll leave you with the above image. My friends already know what is going on, and I will reveal details on the internet once the project is “Live.”
This took me a little while to figure out, so I’ve decided to post what ended up working for me in case it could save someone time. I have a server running Ubuntu 10.10 (though this should also work for 10.04) with a Highpoint Rocket Raid 2680. After getting the card working I learned that you must have a parition on the hard drives you plan to use, otherwise the raid card will not pass the drive on to the operating system. If this happens, you can go into the bios configuration for the card and initialize the hard drive that doesn’t show up in the OS.
This is my broken speaker from my car. It never worked for me and it turns out that it was actually made with paper. I’m replacing my entire stereo system in my car and will post pictures once I have the new gear and installed.
We brought Setesh with us this year to the Jimmy Buffett concert in Bristow VA. We gave countless tours of the truck and had a blast! Everyone walking by stopped to take a look. We’ll be back again next year with even more things for the truck.
Bringing the deuce and a half to Jimmy Buffet this year was a huge success. It went better than we could of hoped for. Thank you to all the people who helped make this possible and to everyone who stopped by for a tour. It was a blast. I’ll post more pictures when I get around to it…
Today we celebrated my brother’s birthday and the new tires for the truck by gaming in the Kingstowne parking lot. After some struggling with the inverter everything worked out perfectly.
