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.
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.”
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.
Every now and then I surf over to Verizon’s FiOS page to see what their latest speeds and rates are. It turns out that they have upped their speeds yet again, this time to either 50 mbs down / 25 mbs up or to a symmetrical 35mbs up/down. I love high upload speeds so I decided to upgrade from my 20/20 plan. The cool part is that this new plan is actually around $15 a month cheaper than my previous plan that was half the speed. Now I can run my Tor node at the same speed as my old plan and still have bandwidth to burn. Verizon may be doing some questionable things as a corporation by selling off their rural DSL lines, but I must say that I’ve never had a problem with my FiOS connection since after it was installed.
I plan to use the truck primarily as a mobile computer networking center with the additional use of functioning as emergency relief. The idea for the networking setup is to be able to drive just about anywhere and instantly have a computer network setup to play video games with a bunch of people. Using some Linux scripting, a custom router, a portable server, and my cell phone it is even capable of having an internet connection. Eventually John and I plan to have all of the internet acquisition function automatically and add the ability to be a mean War Driving machine.
I got a new tablet computer / netbook last week for taking notes in class. I really like this tablet, but it has a few quirks that really need to be ironed out. I’ll get to the complaints in a moment.
The first thing I noticed about this computer once it arrived is that it is very small and very light. It has an 8.9 inch LED backlit display and weighs around 2lbs; it is very portable. It only has 32GB of hard drive space, of which the operating system accounts for nearly half. Asus makes up for the small drive by having TWO SD card slots, which is wonderful. One of the slots is protected by a semi-permanent cover and is labelled “Expansion Slot” while the other slot is the more traditional front facing open access design. Both slots are spring loaded.
They key asset that this netbook leverages is that Read more…
Not the most interesting video, but some people requested that I post what video I had of the most recent LAN party. The game of choice was Warcraft III with DoTA, Castle Fight, Line Tower Wars, and Battle Tanks. There were about 12 people (depending on what specific time). We had 5 people in the Deuce and a Half and another 5 people in my computer room.
I wonder if I will ever be able to beat this record…
Today is the day that I finally had to reboot my Linux router. It was able to stay running for 390 days and 57 minutes. I was able to keep it running through multiple hour long power outages, migrating ISPs, and countless other daily issues. Alas, a problem with the hard drive caused the system to start haning any time it needed to access the drive, causing the internet to become practically unuseable. It took a reboot, disk check, and some error correction to get it working again. It worked fine after that for 15 minutes or so, but now I’m back to the same problem. A temporary solution might be cutting the bittorrent sharing of the new ubuntu release. There might be too many open connections for the router to handle in ram, or it might be trying to cache something. I’ll update when I’ve figured it out.
I was curious how much data I’ve had on my computer network over the span of its existence, so I decided to plug a few data points into open office in order to visualize it. This is what I came up with. I started when I got my first personal computer, a monster of a laptop that had dual hard drives, totaling 100GB of storage. I also had a 120GB external hard drive connected to my first Linux server, and then later attached a 160GB internal drive to it as well. Two 500 GB hard drives later I had a server crash, which caused me to lose just over 1TB of data. I jokingly refer to it as “The Great Server Crash of 2007″. Ever since then I always buy hard drives in pairs. One for actual data storage and the other for backup. If it hadn’t been for that crash, the trend line would actually be really accurate.
