Wysenburg (.RiverCityCanada.com)

This computer has been redone a couple of time since the last documentation. This documentation is of January 2004, although the system was last updated September 2003.

This system is a Linux box. It main purpose is a name server and email server for RiverCityCanada.com but it's also a file server for my private LAN. The system is multihomed and sits on the firewall with one NIC in the LAN (local area network) and one in the WAN (wide area network or Internet). The web services (DNS and email) are served through both NIC's while Samba (file sharing) is only bound to the LAN NIC. Click here for a map of the network. The only other thing special about it is it runs NTP and has a GPS receiver as a time source. Check that out here.

The hardware is a dual Celeron 500. That is a bit strange since Intel never intended the Celeron to run as a dual system. The motherboard is an ABIT BP6 which was suppose to be experimental, but turned out to be very popular. It's the only board that will run dual Celerons. It has 512MB RAM.

The o/s is RedHat Linux 8.0. I updated to RedHat from Caldera a while ago mainly to get journaling for the file system. If there was a power outage, the drives took forever to do a fsck. The Ext3 file system reduced that to minutes. Since then Caldera has been the hotspot of controversy so it's just as well I switched. There were two major updates plus some minor ones. The first to RedHat, and the second to larger RAID drives. I did the update to larger drives at the same time as the update to Darkstar in September 2003, while the update to the RedHat OS was done in March 2003 - I think.

RAID

I tried for quite a while to get the system to boot to RAID drives with Caldera, but to no avail. The RAID modules weren't  compiled in and I'm not brave enough just yet to do it myself. They should have loaded from the RAM drive initrd, but I couldn't get that to work either. RedHat does boot to a RAID drive, so that was another benefit of switching to RedHat.

My original concept was to have a 3x20 RAID5 mounted as /home and the remainder a mirrored RAID1 system disk. What I ended up with is the mirrored 40 GB /home partition and a single 20 GB system disk. One problem was getting enough IDE channels to put each drive on a separate channel. The two mirrored drives are on the onboard HighPoint (ATA66) primary and secondary channels (separate cables), while the system drive is on a standard IDE 33Mb/sec channel.

Not satisfied with just a mirrored drive I reconfigured a couple of more times. In one attempt I bought a couple of Promise ATA100 controllers. One was suppose to be for my Windows system and one to compliment the onboard ATA66 controller on this system but I couldn't get them to work all that well. I think part of the problem was the Caldera Linux and my impatience. I couldn't wait for fsck to finish. In the end I put both Promise controllers in here and abandoned the onboard HighPoint controllers. I also updated to RedHat 8.0 at that time. 

After I upgraded to RedHat I could boot off a mirrored drive so I bought a couple of more 40GB drives and reconfigured. I did this a couple of times, once losing some data in the process. I think I ended up with a RAID5 across the four 40GB drives, plus some mirrored partitions.

When I updated Darkstar, I borrowed two 40GB drives from here and added two 80GB drives. I did this without losing any data. Linux RAID will let you build a RAID drive with one drive offline. I used the offline drive to hold the data while I built the RAID. When the RAID drive was up, I copied the data from the offline drive to the RAID drive and finally, I added the offline drive to the RAID set and it rebuilt the RAID.

The RAID configuration now is 4x40GB RAID5 mounted as /home plus a mirrored 40GB RAID1 mounted as the root drive.

Samba

Nothing special about Samba. It's only available on the LAN NIC and I use it to backup my workstations and other file storage. I joined the Samaba system to my AD so it's available to anyone that logs on to the AD network. I haven't updated to Samba 3.0 yet.

Other Servers

Linux comes with a pile of other services. A couple that I haven't mentioned yet are ftp, sendmail and bind. Sendmail is setup to service the email for RiverCityCanada.com, marien.ca and slsa.sk.ca. It also acts as a second redundant email server for DigitalMapping.sk.ca and PetersSurveys.ca. The name server (bind) is one of two that I have. This one acts as the slave for most of the Internet domains I administer.

NTP is also running on this computer. I compiled and installed version 4.1 and updated a driver to run my Tripmate GPS reciever. I have a small network of time servers that keep two Win2000 networks in sync. Check that out here.

Overall Observations and Comments

This system has been configured a few times since I got it up and running. The RAID has been replaced and redone a few times. Amazingly without losing a lot of data.

I run two SETI's on here. One on each Celeron 500. I also run one on the dual PIII 500. I keep track of them with a program I wrote. It's available from CNET or here.