Re: [tlug] Anyone running a linux server on a mini-ITX MB or similar?

[Scott VanDusen <Scott_VanDusen@example.com>]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the tips. I had checked out the mini-itx site and googled around a bit as well before I posted, but it didn't appear that many people were using these mini boxes for servers so I thought I'd ask the list.

> But... these really small cases generally use 2.5" (laptop) disks which, 
> IMHO, have a much shorter life than their 3.5" cousins. I also put two 
> disks in the box (there were screw holes for a second disk) so I could
> setup a s/w raid on one half of each disk and use the second half of the 
> second disk for backups.
I'm responsible for asset management at my company and I can't count the number of failed laptop hard drives I've had to replace. So going with those 2.5s would be a bad idea I agree. I was hoping to do software raid 1 mirror on to sata ides if they can fit. Also I was wondering if heat would become an issue so I'm thankful for your advice on that. 

I reckon I'll mosey over to Akihabara this afternoon and see what's new in mini and micro. Last year I built a mini for my dad and shipped it to the states, he hasn't had any problems with it as of yet, but it's not on 24/7. I'm also curious about the waterpump cooling systems as well, geek out! I'll keep you all posted if you're interested in the progress of the project.

BTW I had initially planned on putting this server on an AMD64 box I have at home, but I was having issues with the filesystem- I had LVM running on software RAID 1 mirror /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. I could boot into the raid mirror without problem, bring up an X window, etc,  but after booting from the /dev/hda where /boot was at, /boot disappeared so I couldn't update the kernel. Really wierd. You could fdisk /dev/hda, but couldn't mount it or anything. After a couple weeks of playing around with the fstab and other boot parameters I came to the conclusion that it was probably a hardware issue where the onboard SATA was auto assigning IRQ or something which made the /dev/hda inaccessible.

To make a long story short (or longer!), I got sick of futzing around with it, and instead installed 64 bit XP so I could play half-life 2. I know. I'm a loser.

 Anyway thanks again for the tips everyone.

Scott VanDusen

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