Darkstar (.local.DigitalMapping.sk.ca)

I updated this computer. For a couple of reasons. It needed a clean install. I also wanted to try a few more things like RAID and VPN. I found a dual PII motherboard for cheap that got me started. I already had a dual Celeron 500 I used as my workstation and I bought a quad Pentium Pro 200 system off eBay so I was into multiple processors.

Multiple Processors (MPS) and RAID

The quad turned out to be overkill and too expensive to experiment with. It has RAID but required SCSII drives. I ended up using it on the other end of the VPN (see below). The new Darkstar is a dual PII 300 on a ASUS P2L97 - DS motherboard. I found the matched PII's on eBay. It has SCSII built in but I don't use it right now. It has 256MB memory and 2 x 20GB plus one 13GB hard drives in a RAID 5 (3 x 13GB), a RAID 1 (2 x 7GB mirrored) and another RAID1 (2 x 4 GB mirrored) configuration for a total of 37GB of mirrored disk space. The drives are IDE and relatively inexpensive.

Update sept.29.2002: The 4GB mirrored drive was an after thought as I thought I needed a non-mirrored drive to boot. I partitioned off 4GB for the boot drive. It turns out that you can mirror the boot partition after the system is built. Had I known that, I would have just made two mirrored partitions: RAID 5 (3 x 13GB), and a RAID 1 (2 x 11GB mirrored).

The new system works fine as a domain controller in Active Directory. It also supplies DHCP, DNS and WINS services. It's a mail server, printer server and file server. While I use the builtin SMTP server for email, the pop3 server is my own - check it out here. I also run SETI and United Devices cancer research. Granted, the demands of half a dozen workstations certainly doesn't tax the system, but the latter two processes keep the processors at 100% all the time. The only problem I have is cooling. The fans on the quad PPro system were way too loud, but this one also is getting annoying. The fan on the back processor fried from the heat within six months although they weren't the best fans. I have two other case fans besides the power supply fan and the processors still stay too hot too hang on to. I'll have to look into some better cooling if I want to keep it.

Update sept.29.2002: To solve the cooling problem and the noise from the fans, I removed the side of the case and got rid of the two extra case fans. Running with an open case seems to keep the system cooler. I now run a few of my systems this way.

RAID

The RAID works great. I pulled one of the drives and stuck in a different one to see what happened. The system rebuilt the mirrors with 15 or twenty minutes. It wasn't automatic, but still it worked just fine. I quit using my tape system for backup and just backup my workstation to the server nightly. I think I'll add periodic CD copies of my data and abandon the tape system for good.

The RAID on my Linux system works just as well, but the fsck takes at least twenty minutes to run if I have a power outage.

VPN

The VPN worked so-so. It's a workable system, but a bit slow with my ADSL connections. The download speed is 1.5 Mb, but the upload is only 128 Kb. Because both ends were ADSL, I ended up with 128 Kb both ways. I was also short one IP address on one end as I'll explain later.

I installed the quad as a domain controller for a separate domain tree and then joined the trees with trusts in Active Directory. This worked well within my office. I then moved my quad to another location. The quad was multi homed so I used it as the router for the VPN. The DC/VPN combination didn't work well. The VPN worked, but is not the recommended configuration. There are problems with the network browsers. The DC is the master browser by dedfault for the network so should keep the list of computers. Because the DC was multi-homed it tried to get the list from the wrong NIC at times.

The VPN router should really be a separate computer.

The whole test was to see if I could use the VPN to place a second domain controller at a remote place to service a domain there, plus both of them would be backup for the other. One problem was that if the remote failed, it was also the router so the connection would be lost. As far as sharing resources with another office, the connection proved to be too slow. There also wasn't a lot we could share. The second domain and all the resources showed up in the Network Places or Neighborhood, but very sloooowly. All the computers required adding a static route to see through the VPN because the VPN wasn't the default gateway.

On my end, I used a separate computer as the router for the VPN, but I was running out of IP addresses here also. I have two, but I also have two name servers, so I had to compromise one of the name servers by adding the VPN router to it. While it worked, I finally abandoned the connections which caused some more problems. I ended up with domain controllers connected in AD, but without a physical connection. In order to break the trusts, I have to demote the domain controller while they are connected. If it's the last domain controller for the domain, it deletes the domain and the trusts are discontinued. So now I need an extra computer to do that on both ends. In the mean time, both servers keep searching for each other - and complaining about it.

Update sept.29.2002: I finally fixed the trust problem. The remote DC had to be rebuilt. It wouldn't let me demote it until it replicated the AD. I didn't have the resources to put the VPN back up, so I just reinstalled the O/S. I converted the quad PPro system to a web server and used a Linux/Samba system as a PDC for the Windows domain at the remote domain. Administration is handled through Webmin (Linux) and Terminal Server (Win2000).

Overall Observations and Comments

VPN works, RAID works, and with MPS you can have performance graphs for each processor. Here is a rare screen shot of six processors from two computers. I was logged onto the dual system and connected to the quad with terminal server.

I need something else to try.

Check out the oldest Darkstar here.