Stuart Herbert

The external Maxtor drive I backup my photo library to is dying. Fortunately, it’s only a backup, but still - it’s reminded me that I really need to get my fileserver up and running.

Since I last looked at this project, the Marvell SATA chipset driver has been included in the kernel. This is a really good thing - I didn’t want to rely on my own attempts to port the driver to later Linux kernels.

Unfortunately, I’ve had no luck getting the driver to work.

The driver included in gentoo-sources-2.6.16-r7 locks the box up whenever I try to access any of the disks connected via the Marvell chipset. There’s no kernel panic - interrupts seem disabled, and the only recourse seems to be hitting the power switch.

According to kernel.org, there’s been a few bug fixes added to the sata_mv driver since 2.6.16 was released. I’ve tried 2.6.17-rc5-git4, but I honestly couldn’t tell you whether these fixes work or not. Unfortunately, this kernel can’t initialise the VIA SATA chipset that the root filing system disks are connected to, so I can’t get far enough to find out whether or not the Marvell chipset now works.

I wonder if Marvell themselves have released an updated version of their driver, or whether the in-kernel driver superceeds it?

I’ve been asked how I’m getting on with my personal project to build my new fileserver. I figured that, instead of just replying to James directly, I might as well add an entry to my blog’s category on this.

To be honest, I haven’t touched the fileserver project since my last blog update. The fileserver’s sat under my desk, powered down, until I have a bit more free time to devote to it. I’ve been sidetracked (from Gentoo work as well ) with providing consultancy and some programming to help a firm migrate one of their in-house systems to a Gentoo-based solution. That project should be coming to a successful conclusion in the next few weeks, and that should allow me time to get back to my fileserver work.

The next steps for me are to

1. Upgrade to kernel 2.6.15, and try the SATA chipset driver now included. At the moment, the fileserver uses a driver that I modified to work with later 2.6 kernels. It’s not that I don’t trust my data to my own programming skills, but, well frankly, I don’t I do kernel hacking so rarely that it’d be all too easy for me to have made some mistake that I wouldn’t spot until all my data disappeared.
2. Use the dual-xeon box as a compile host for the fileserver. The EPIA 1300SP is fast enough to make an adequate desktop box, but it’s not well-suited for large compilations.
3. Rebuild the box from scratch, using Xen 3.0 and Modular-X. Although the box is going to be a fileserver first and foremost, most of the time it’s going to be sat around with the CPU idling. I also have the small matter of the 200GB RAID-1 array dedicated to the O/S that I’m never going to fill just with Samba. So I’m going to evaluate Xen 3 on the box, and assuming that the performance isn’t an issue, I’ll eventually add other roles for the server, such adding my IMAP server.
4. Evaluate and select a package for managing backups. I’m not going to write a backup solution myself; there must be plenty of suitable open packages out there. I need to pick the one that will best fit the fileserver project; preferably one that I can integrate into a web-based management console.

I still need to sit down, play with the HAL bindings for Python, and put together some utilities to automatically assess and re-configure drives when they are hot-swapped. I’m repeatedly reminded that the kernel’s SATA hot-swap code isn’t 100% solid yet, so I’m assuming I’ll have to look into whether anything can be done about that at some point. The box will need a web-based management interface, and some solid server monitoring and alerting tools (because out of sight, out of mind leads to dead fileservers and lost data). I’ll need to add support for additional backups to DVD, and to USB external drives. I’d like to add support for my digital cameras, to save the images having to travel over the LAN just to be downloaded to the fileserver.

There’s a lot to do before I’ll actually be able to store any real data on this puppy, and scant time to spend on it.

The VIA board I’m using in my new fileserver has an onboard Unichrome-II graphics chip. I didn’t have any luck getting X up and running using the stable X11 6.8.2 packages, but the via driver in the X11 6.8.99 packages works.

I don’t know how the X.Org via driver compares to the Unichrome project’s driver. I couldn’t find an ebuild for this driver in the main Portage tree. If it turns out that the X.Org via driver doesn’t support all the hardware acceleration of the Unichrome-II, I’ll make the time to take a good look at the Unichrome project’s driver.

Speaking of hardware acceleration … next step is to get mplayer built Oh, and some themes for Gnome that aren’t as butt-ugly as the default ones!

The good news is that HighPoint’s driver for the 1820A card now loads. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but building the kernel module whilst booted from the Gentoo 2005.1 livecd meant that the module ended up with the wrong version string, which wasn’t compatible either with the livecd kernel nor the kernel I installed for the box. Booting the box into its own kernel, and then rebuilding the module, fixed that.

I don’t yet know which driver is the better choice - the Marvell driver, or Highpoint’s own. Benchmarking performance is one thing, but what I really need is some sort of stress test to help determine just how stable and reliable each driver is.

All the remaining parts for my 1.5 TB fileserver arrived last week, and I’m slowly getting Gentoo onto the machine, and getting the machine up and running.

The EPIA SP 13000 board I’m using for the box certainly feels much nippier than any of the VIA boards I used last year to build cheap firewalls from. That said, it’s still quite painful to compile on

I was surprised and disappointed to find that the connector on the end of the firewire cable on my CoolerMaster Stacker isn’t compatible with the header on the motherboard. I’m not sure who is “at fault” over that. Still, it doesn’t prevent the onboard firewire port from working for now.

Been having some “fun” trying to get a driver for the HighPoint RocketRaid 1820A card working. There isn’t a driver included in the kernel source tree. HighPoint’s own driver is open source (brownie points for them), but hasn’t been updated since July, and doesn’t compile out of the box with later 2.6 kernels. There’s a problem with loading the module too, which I haven’t had time to get to the bottom of yet.

This particular SATA card uses the Marvell MV88SX5081 chipset. A quick search on Google turns up quite a few references to a Marvell GPL driver - but no obvious link to the driver itself on the Marvell website. The closest I’ve come is this page, which has details of how someone @ Edoceo managed to get a Marvell driver working on Gentoo. This driver at least loads under a 2.6.13 kernel

Whether it actually works or not will have to wait until tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to decide what motherboard / CPU combination to use in the file server since getting back from holiday. Ideally I’m after something that’s cheap, low-power, and has on-board SATA and PATA.

I’m a big fan of the Pentium-M, but there just doesn’t seem to be any ATX boards out there for this chip; not from my preferred suppliers at any rate. I could get an Asus socket 478 motherboard, and use their Pentium-M adapter, but I can’t find any evidence on their website that they’ve certified modern boards with the adapter I’m hoping to build a few more of these servers in the future for friends and family, and I’d rather not base them on something that I’m not confident will still be around when the time comes.

It’s possible to get a mini-ITX board for the Pentium-M, but I’d be looking at a cost of around £325 for a motherboard plus CPU - and that seems expensive compared to the VIA mini-ITX boards that are available.

Clock for clock, I find VIA chips very slow compared to any other x86 chip that I’ve used. I have two of these already in Linux-based firewalls that I’ve built in the past. Still - it’s a file server. The largest thing I’ll be building on there will be PHP 5 for the web-based admin software.

I ordered an EPIA SP 13000 from Mini-ITX.com on Thursday, with a stick of RAM. Never had a bad experience with these guys yet, and true to form my parcel was waiting for me next door when I got home from work tonight. I’ll pop down City Road after class tomorrow and pick up a couple of hard drives and a power supply, and hopefully I’ll have the machine booting tomorrow.

It’s just too hot tonight to sit down and concentrate on Gentoo stuff. It’s so hot that the glue holding Kristi’s trebuchet together melted!

I ordered two hard drive caddies yesterday, and they arrived today. They’re the first parts to go into the case.

One of the important things about fitting drive caddies is being able to easily get at the screw holes on both sides of the 5.25″ drive bays, so that the caddies can be properly secured. The CoolerMaster Stacker case sides both pop off (and back on!) very easily, which is nice. As the drive caddies are for PATA IDE drives, I’ve put them down at the very bottom of the case, so that the ribbons will be as near to the motherboard’s IDE ports as possible. However, I’ve discovered that the screw holes for the bottom drive bay in the Stacker case are partially obscured by the case frame. My normal screwdriver was simply too fat to fit in the gap

The caddies themselves are a pair of StarTech Value IDE Removable Drive Drawers, model no DRW110ATABK. I deliberately bought bottom of the range - these cost me just over £10 each. And at the moment I’m in two minds about them.

It’s great that the caddies come with all the screws that you could need. Unfortunately, I found them to be quite soft, and I managed to damage the heads of every single screw just using a normal hand-held screwdriver. If I was looking to fit a lot of these quickly, using a powered screwdriver, I’d be concerned about whether the screw heads would survive.

The other problem is that I managed to break one of the enclosures the very first time I tried slotting in a caddy. The enclosures have two plastic tabs at the top. The caddy has a lever which slots under these tabs. The tabs aren’t very strong, and when I tried to close the lever with the caddy not seated firmly, the plastic level snapped the tab right off. It doesn’t look like the tabs are essential for securing the caddies in their bays (fortunately!) but we’ll have to see.

Would I order more of these caddies? Probably not. StarTech make an all-metal alternative, but I’d be concerned both about the total cost of fitting 11 of these, and the fact that they’re ATA133. It’s one thing to replace £60 worth of drive caddies when ATA133 drives disappear off the market; it’d be another thing altogether to replace £550 worth! StarTech do make a SATA I range of enclosures, but SATA II drives are starting to appear, and they don’t list a UK distributor for their top of the line aluminium version.

The only affordable alternative I could find this evening is the Icy Dock range of enclosures. They do an aluminium SATA enclosure which costs less than £20. That’s cheap enough to make it possible to write off the enclosures when SATA II becomes the common type of drive. I’m going to get a few of these caddies ordered, and see what they’re like.

I have three hobbies which really eat up disk space (and I’m not talking about Gentoo here I’ve kept something like 7,000 photos that I’ve taken in the last year or so (and I haven’t had a proper holiday in that time either …). When I remember to take the camcorder along, I shoot as much footage as I can when I train with Rob. I can never keep up with everything he’s pointing out during class! And I write and record music (something I haven’t done enough of for a couple of years now). Now that the wife has a Nikon of her own, I’m going to need even more storage.

It has to be online storage. Kristi uses the photo archive as reference material for her paintings. It has to be resilient - I don’t want to lose data because of a disk failure. And it has to be backed up - it’s too easy to accidentally delete data, or for a buggy app to do so on your behalf

I could buy a NAS box, plug it in, and job done. But that just seems too easy, and far too boring So the plan is to put something together myself to do the job, using Gentoo as the base O/S of course Hardly a difficult job, but something that I can have some fun with.

The first thing I need is the right case. A NAS box is going to need lots of disks - 2 for the O/S, and at least 6 for the data. Over the lifetime of the machine, those disks are going to fail and need replacing. I’ve recently been having to replace a few dead disks in my existing boxes, and having to disconnect IDE ribbons and remove motherboard power connectors just to get the disks out of the bays … it’s just unnecessary effort really. What I want is a case with lots of 5.25″ bays, which I can fit drive enclousures into. When a disk fails, just pull out the draw, pop out the old drive, pop in the new one, close the draw. I shouldn’t have to remove the case cover for a failed disk.

I already own two derelict full-tower cases, which are just wasting space in the upstairs library at home. They have plenty of drive bays, and they were great in the days when I used SCSI drives. But IDE ribbons tend to be a lot shorter - and are limited to just two drives per cable. The top drive bays are just too far away from the motherboard (and even further away from any additional IDE controllers on PCI cards). Not my first choice for practicality.

What I really want is a case where the 5.25″ bays are as close to the motherboard as possible. I settled on CoolerMaster’s Stacker case. It has the bays that I want where I want them - all 11 of them. Mine arrived this morning, and is now sat downstairs in the lounge waiting for me to move it out of Kristi’s way.

Can’t do any more with it this month (already paid for our holiday this month, doesn’t leave a lot for toys!), but next month’s job is to take a trip down City Road and pick up a PSU, mobo, CPU, RAM … and some disks.