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?
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Computers, Projects
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.
Here’s the answer to the tricky part:
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Computers, How To, Technical Notes
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.
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