Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware //at 18:24 //by abe

Ever since my former desktop machine gsa died and I started using only laptops at home, I noticed a need for a home server for storing all my MP3s, holiday pictures, games, and backups of my other machines. And I also want a filtering web proxy at home again.

Current situation

Currently my Norhtec MicroClient Jr. “c2” with it’s 120 GB 2.5" harddisk does some of these jobs (mostly storage and backup), but it neither has the disk space nor the performance to do all the things I want.

For storage I once bought a TheCus N4100, the big brother of the popular and officially Debian supported N2100. Unfortunately there are a few things different than in the N2100 (NIC without MAC) which makes it much more difficult to get Debian on it and the original firmware doesn’t support NFS at all. *grmpf* I had hints from others who managed to get Debian on this NAS, but I didn’t find the time and leisure to really dig into cross-compiling kernels. (Although with the new 1.3.06 firmware, so called modules became possible also for the N4100 and a SSH module has been posted with which a Debian chroot could be installed and the required kernel build on the machine itself.)

I though wasn’t very angry when the N4100+ came out shortly after I bought the N4100, because the N4100+ was no more an ARM based device but had a Celeron processor inside instead. And a NAS which is built on average PC hardware wasn’t as appealing as some device based on some more exotic architecture mainly used in embedded devices. :-)

The Mini-ITX Appeal

This view changed rapidly, when Raffzahn showed me a few Mini-ITX boards and cases. I surfed around on Mini-ITX.com store and stumbled upon the NAS-like ES34069 case from Chenbro featuring four S-ATA hotswap 3.5" slots, a slim-line CD-ROM drive slot, a SD card reader, and enough space for an additional 2.5" hard disk and a low profile Mini-ITX board.

Additionally, the VIA EPIA SN series of Mini-ITX boards sports 4 S-ATA ports and either a passively cooled 1 GHz C7 processor or an actively cooled 1.8 GHz C7 processor. That should be enough power for a small multi-purpose home server while still keep the power consumption low. And I’m not the only one having this idea, Mini-ITX.com suggests this combination and Chenbro officially supports the VIA EPIA SN boards.

Additionally, Debian 5.0 Lenny seems to run fine on the SN series, only lm-sensors seems to have problems with SN18000G and SN10000EG (but not SN18000 and SN10000E).

So when the Chenbro ES34069 case showed up in digitec’s online shop, I ordered one there and a VIA EPIA SN18000G board at Brack. I didn’t order any disks since for data storage I plan to use the four Samsung 400 GB 3.5" S-ATA disks I bought for the N4100, and for the system I plant to use the 2.5" disk I initially bought for my MicroClient JrSX “c1”, but then continued to use it only with the CF card. Not yet sure, if I’ll also equip the slim-line optical drive slot, too.

The case took several weeks to deliver and the mainboard hasn’t arrived yet. Instead I got an e-mail from Brack that VIA products are currently very difficult to get in Switzerland. Reason is said to be that VIA tries to channel the distribution of their products to a single distributor. (Sounds somehow similar to what Apple tried with the iPhone and failed.)

Mini-ITX boards and power consumption

So I now have a nice case without a board. There aren’t that many Mini-ITX boards out there sporting 4 S-ATA ports. One which cleary stood out was the new Intel DG45FC Mini-ITX board with LGA775 socket. (In Switzerland neither available at Brack nor at digitec, but e.g. at PCP.) But reading the specs of this board it was also clear that it wasn’t thought for NAS systems but high-performance HTPCs — the focus seems to be on multimedia performance which a NAS doesn’t need.

Its newer sister, the Intel DQ45EK Mini-ITX board is focussed more on office and business PCs than on multimedia. But Intels remote adminstration is not really a plus for me (don’t need it, I’ve got SSH ;-) and it’s neither cheaper than the DG45FC nor does it have significantly lower power-consuption.

Despite the 120W power-supply there are people who already combined the Chenbro ES34069 with the Intel DG45FC or DQ45EK board, e.g. one of the administrators of the German NAS-Portal forums built such a machine and this German guy who wants to build a Windows Home Server based on such a combination. At least the NAS-Portal administrator found out that the board consumes so much power that together with the 4 S-ATA disks the included 120W power supply doesn’t suffice and the system is not stable in this configuration. Trusted Reviews review of the DG45FC explains why: It’s one of the first Mini-ITX board not following the MoDT idea, has a desktop chipset instead a mobile chipset and therefore hasn’t all of the power-saving features of those mobile chipsets.

But it’s easy to see anyway: Most of the CPUs supported by the DG45FC and DQ45EK boards have a TDP of 65W. Offically the processor cooler delivered with the case supports processors with up to 65W, but 65W is already more than the half of what the power supply delivers and according to the Trusted Reviews review, the board itself consumes another 35W itself. So for the four 3.5" S-ATA disks — which are usually not as economical as notebook disks — about 20W are left. This can’t work! The guy from NAS-Portal.org plans to solve the problem by using a universal 180W notebook power supply instead of the original one.

In comparison to the 100W of the both Intel boards, VIA’s SN18000G consumes only 26W (the fanless SN10000EG even only 22W) and that’s board and processor! That’s about ¼ of what the Intel board consumes. Imagine the difference between having a 100W light bulb (suffices for a whole small room) shining 365 days a year compared to a 25W light bulb (often used in bedside lamps) in a year.

Other Mini-ITX mainboards with 4x S-ATA include the following ones:

• Jetway JNC62K: According to Mini-ITX.com it fits into the Chenbro ES34069 case, but requires at least a 120W power supply which again questions its power consumption and its usage together with four 3.5" harddisks, although it is recommended for the ES34069 by Mini-ITX.com. But I haven’t made that good experiences with NVidia chipsets yet, so this board seems currently no option for me anyway. OTOH there’s German speaking guy who build a ES34069 based server using this board and only three SATA harddisks and runs the OpenSolaris based and commercial NexentaStor on it, so the hardware can’t be too exotic. (Review at Bit-Tech; Review at MiniITX.biz)
• (Added on 07-Oct-2008) Jetway NC81-LF: The non-Nvidia brother of the NC82K using the AMD 780G chipset. Supports CPUs from 35W to 65W TDP. (Review at MiniTechNet)
• Albatron KI690-AM2: Already over one year old and Silent PC Review says it has an extremely restrictive BIOS and poor fan control. (Another Review at TweakTown)
• iEi KINO-9454-R20: Seems to support only Pentium 4 and Pentium D.
• Several Commell mainboards: LV-66A (VIA C7 1.5 GHz), LV-672 (Pentium 4), LV-674 (Pentium D).
• Gigabyte GA-6KIEH-RH (not yet available)
• Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX: Socket mPGA478 and mPGA479, supports Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile beyond others; 3x GBit network interfaces, but also quite multimedia focussed — the review at EPIACenter.de (German written) says using it for NAS or a network-focussed machine is casting pearls before swine. :-) But the same counts for the DG45FC surely, too. ;-) Importer for Switzerland seems to be fabrimexSystems and end customers can buy it e.g. at ichbinleise.ch (which seem to sell only Kontron mainboards), but it’s way more expensive than the Intel DG45FC and even more expensive than the VIA SN18000G.
• J&W MINIX™ 780G-SP128MB (identical to the Albatron KI780G mainboard according to MiniTechNet): Another new multimedia focussed mainboard, but unless ATI drivers are way less usable than the NVidia drivers, I prefer not to use ATI graphics cards. (Review at MiniITX.biz)
• Advantech AIMB-221, AMD/ATI based and said to have a power-consumption less than 100W and a low TCO. But 100W are still too much for the 120W PSU. (German review at MiniTechNet)

Conclusion

For now, I decided to wait a little bit more for my VIA EPIA SN18000G board which still seems to be the best board for the Chenbro ES34069 case although not really cheap. But if I once in a not that distant future decide to have a desktop at home again, I’m quite sure it’ll sport a cute Mini-ITX case (perhaps a nice black-orange HFX micro M1 case by mCubed — unfortunately the M2 is no more available in a color combination including orange ;-) with an Intel DG45FC or Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX and a decent Core 2 Duo processor.

Software Plans

Of course my home server will run Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny on it, with software RAID-5 and LVM2 over the 1.6 TB of S-ATA disks resulting in 1.2 TB available disk space which will be offered using at least NFS, SMB and SSH (think sshfs). Planned software includes BackupPC (a very fine pulling backup system for machines which are not online 24/7) and Privoxy. I’ll perhaps also install Tor and a caching proxy like Squid or Polipo. Another idea is to run Mediatomb on that machine. :-)

MicroClient Sr. //at 01:16 //by abe

About a year ago, I bought a Norhtec MicroClient Jr., a complete 200 MHz MMX-compatible SoC (“Vortex86”) PC so small that it fits into your hand or onto VESA mountings. Althought thought as thin client, the machine has 128 MB RAM and runs Debian from either netboot, USB stick, CF card or 2.5” harddisk without problems and not even that slow.

Later last year, we needed more MicroClient Jrs. at work and since the MicroClient JrSX had a 300 MHz 486SX-compatible SoC processor (“Vortex86SX”) from MSTi and 128 MB DDR RAM instead of SD RAM, we expected them at least in the same performance range and bought a few for ETH and I also bought one for myself. Well, they were about three times slower, since the FPU is missing, not all programs from Debian Etch work fine, e.g. X doesn’t work without patching and recompiling (with Sid, X works, but not the kernel anymore – Update, 26-Jul-2008: See #454776 for a solution for this problem)…

BTW: I had both machines with me at FOSDEM ‘08 at the Debian booth and the MMX-compatible machine also at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) at the Symlink booth and in Kurt Gramlich’s talk about ecological computers. So if you saw them there, just imagine the same case, with a twice to three times faster CPU and four times the amount of RAM, but with roughly the same carbon foot-print!

For our thin client purposes at work we now use ALIX boards from PC Engines (Mini-ITX format) with 500 MHz AMD Geode processors. They’re much faster than the MicroClient Jr. and need even less power.

Today, while surfing around on some Mini-ITX shops, I found some computer in obviously MicroClient Jr. case, but with 500 MHz VIA Eden processor and 512 MB of RAM. I first couldn’t believe it. They are selling it as eTC-2500. Since eTC-2300 was one of the brandings of the MicroClient Jr. which is called eBox-2300 officially by the manufacturer DM&P, I searched for eBox-2500, but didn’t find anything useful. Then I looked at the manufacturer’s product page at CompactPC.com.tw and found the eBox-4300 — so it’s really true, they managed to fit a board with 500 MHz VIA processor and half a Gig of RAM into the already fscking small space inside the MicroClient Jr. case, and even without needing more power: Still 15W from the power adaptor. Next stop was Norhtec’s Website. And yes, they also have a new MicroClient product: The MicroClient Sr.. I really need to have one of those for my MicroClient collection! ;-)

The days of my last running Woody are numbered… //at 21:29 //by abe

As many of the Planet Debian readers know, I bemoan Galeon 1.2 and therefore Woody. For a long time I haven’t found an appropriate browser replacement for Galeon 1.2 in Sarge, so I never switched my home workstation called “gsa” (Pentium II, 400 MHz, 572 MB RAM) to Sarge, since Woody was rockstable and just worked.

Though, after a few Galeon 1.3/2.0 rants, someone pointed me to Kazehakase, which indeed is a fine Galeon 1.2 replacement. But I noticed that Kazehakase in Sarge was in an early stage and the Kazehakase from testing (now Etch) were already much more matured.

So in comparison to Sarge with Etch I won’t have the problem of not having a mature and sage web browser in main. And due to security support for Woody ceased a few months ago and Etch is now declared stable, it’s time to reinstall my last Woody box with Etch.

For that, a repartioning of it’s two hard disks (8 GB and 40 GB) sounds like a good idea and so I had look, what’s on all those partitions where I once had a shot on quite a few Linux distributions and other unix-like operating systems. (Although I was already a big fan of Debian at that time, I wanted to look over my own nose and ordered a few CDs of free operating system at LinISO.de.)

So here’s what I found, never really used and will throw away quite soon:

• RedHat 9
• Mandrake 9.2beta2
• FreeBSD 4.8
• OpenBSD 3.3
• one more, not yet identified (or perhaps even never formatted) Linux partition

That should give enough space for an Etch installation without touching the Woody installation first. Thanks to Venty, I’ve got a DVD drive for that box, so I can install from DVD.

And for toying around with all those other neat and free operating systems nowadays, I’ve got my MicroClient Jr. named “c2”.

Segmentation faulty tree //at 21:29 //by abe

aptitude on Etch just gave me a funny error message:

1/0/0 root@c2:pts/2 21:14:24 [~] # aptitude upgrade 
Reading package lists... Done
Segmentation faulty tree... 87%
2/139/0 root@c2:pts/2 21:14:43 [~] # 

Ctrl-Ms can be nice sometimes…