Secondary store

Hi Simon,

On 8/27/2014 2:36 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2014-08-27, edward.ming.lee@gmail.com<edward.ming.lee@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> These 5 to 6 years old netbooks are useless otherwise, but they are better
>> than your 10+ years stuff.  If i don't use them, they will be trashed anyway.
>> First, they are made unusable with Vista, but they are great for Linux router.
>> The 10" screen and resolutions are too small for real work.
>
> Actually, for me, those netbooks are the ideal size and weight to be
> able to drop into a backpack and pull out again on the train.
>
> They are small enough to not take up a major part of a 15 litre backpack
> and they are light enough not to be really noticable while walking
> around a city (although I wouldn't carry one on a long distance
> day walk. :-))
>
> I run Scientific Linux 5.x on mine (an Acer Aspire 1).

I've wanted to hack a small laptop to make a KMM out of it.  Instead,
I've had to settle for a 7" monitor and a 9" keyboard kept together
in a little sack for those uses.  (of course, wouldn't help *you*
as you want a "real machine" on your travels)

I keep an old Sony laptop (back when CD, floppy, etc. were *external*
devices) for those times when I want something small, email, etc.
Has the added advantage that if it got lost/grew legs I wouldn't miss
it!  :>

On Wednesday, August 27, 2014 2:36:37 PM UTC-7, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2014-08-27, edward.ming.lee@gmail.com <edward.ming.lee@gmail.com> wrote:
 
> > These 5 to 6 years old netbooks are useless otherwise, but they are better than your 10+ years stuff.  If i don't use them, they will be trashed anyway. First, they are made unusable with Vista, but they are great for Linux router. The 10" screen and resolutions are too small for real work. 
> 
> Actually, for me, those netbooks are the ideal size and weight to be able to drop into a backpack and pull out again on the train.

Problem is the low resolution of 10" 1024x.  My other machines are 11" 1300x.  The higher resolution makes them much better.

> They are small enough to not take up a major part of a 15 litre backpack and they are light enough not to be really noticable while walking around a city (although I wouldn't carry one on a long distance day walk. :-))
> 
> I run Scientific Linux 5.x on mine (an Acer Aspire 1).

Which one?  I think they have 8.9", 10.1" and 11.6".  Haven't check the resolutions, but the 11" is probably fine.

On 2014-08-27, edward.ming.lee@gmail.com <edward.ming.lee@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 27, 2014 2:36:37 PM UTC-7, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2014-08-27, edward.ming.lee@gmail.com <edward.ming.lee@gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>> > These 5 to 6 years old netbooks are useless otherwise, but they are better than your 10+ years stuff.  If i don't use them, they will be trashed anyway. First, they are made unusable with Vista, but they are great for Linux router. The 10" screen and resolutions are too small for real work. 
>> 
>> Actually, for me, those netbooks are the ideal size and weight to be able to drop into a backpack and pull out again on the train.
>
> Problem is the low resolution of 10" 1024x.  My other machines are 11" 1300x. 
> The higher resolution makes them much better.
>

I would not want to use it all day, but it's ok while on the train for
up to about 90 minutes.

>> They are small enough to not take up a major part of a 15 litre backpack and they are light enough not to be really noticable while walking around a city (although I wouldn't carry one on a long distance day walk. :-))
>> 
>> I run Scientific Linux 5.x on mine (an Acer Aspire 1).
>
>Which one?  I think they have 8.9", 10.1" and 11.6".  Haven't check the
> resolutions, but the 11" is probably fine.

8.9 inch, resolution 1024x600, model version ZG5.

For dropping into a backpack, it's an ideal size as I would not want
to be lugging a bigger version around while also having packed quite
a bit of other stuff as well.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

edward.ming.lee@gmail.com wrote:
> Why deal with old stuffs, when newer hardwares are dirt cheap.

My router wasn't 'old' in 2005, it was top-of-the-line (for consumer kit
anyway, it replaced a power hungry PC which is what got used for routing in
the late 90s/early-2000s: Netgear etc boxes came along later)

In 2012 it was 'old', but it was a case of "I fly at 6am tomorrow, I need
something right away to run my networking stuff".  Sometimes waiting for the
post is too long, and the selection of devices that are available retail
locally isn't good enough.

Curiously enough, I had to buy a new router recently and noticed that in 10
years there hasn't been a lot of improvement: many of the devices out there
have better CPUs, but still have 8MB RAM/4MB flash and at the same kind of
price point they sold for a decade ago.  There's a few more 'high end'
routers that have more RAM and USB than there used to be, but you still have
to pick through the minefield to find them (only a subset will run OpenWRT
for instance).

> My GSM/Wifi router runs on a 16G microSD via USB.  With 1G system memory
> on 1.6GHz dual core Atom, speed is not a problem.  With at least 8G log
> space, it should outlast me as well.
> 
> Should I feel guilty about wasting resources?  But it draws not much more
> power than COTS router, perhaps 5W average.  And the netbook cost me less
> than $50, becasuse of a cracked LCD screen.

So you're running on an old netbook?  That doesn't sound like 'wasting
resources' - like my router it was going spare.  But they're different
things: I doubt your netbook's wifi would manage a whole city block (which
my router didn't quite do either, but would have been handy).

Theo

> > Should I feel guilty about wasting resources?  But it draws not much more power than COTS router, perhaps 5W average.  And the netbook cost me less than $50, becasuse of a cracked LCD screen.
 
> So you're running on an old netbook?  That doesn't sound like 'wasting resources' - like my router it was going spare.  But they're different things: I doubt your netbook's wifi would manage a whole city block (which my router didn't quite do either, but would have been handy).

I think i could, in theory. ;-)  With three devices connected, the Wifi server proc (hostapd) never get much more than 1% usage.  So, it could support at least 100 devices.  Perhaps someday, i'll try it and see how many can connect to it in public.

The argument against using PC/laptops vs. COT routers has been price and power consumption.  These old netbooks can beat/match COT routers with around $50 and 5W.

However, running with the hard drive would double the power consumption to at least 10W.  It is better to have enough memory and run it diskless.

On 2014-08-22, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:
>
> I'm trying to replace the box that does most of my basic
> network services, here:  DNS, BOOTP, DHCP, Font server,
> NTP, TFTP, etc.
>
> All have reasonably light footprints (I think!).  But,
> all have been written (NetBSD) assuming gobs of memory
> available!

Hi Don

I'm a little late into this discussion but since we discussed this
at length last time around and I still remember a lot of the context
I'll throw in my two cents...

I take it we're still talking about Neoware (or similar) terminals
here?  The specs mentioned elsewhere seem to fit that assumption.
If we're talking about something going under a dresser (on a carpet?)
I'd hope it's passively cooled to keep the fluff out as well as
keeping the noise down for fit-and-forget devices such as this.

On a similar vein I've noticed that the cooling on those kinds of
devices tends to be a lot better when vertically orientated -
obviously I can't speak for your particular circumstances but I'd
stop and think whether it can be orientated upright in another
out of the way location - say understairs or airing cupboard, or
even wall mounted _behind_ the dresser - with passive cooling you
really need to help things out as much as possible to maximise
useful life.

As for your substantive question a microdrive style unit (i.e. CF
interface HDD) is the obvious solution - your capacity is limited
to around 4 or 5GB but that's room for a full NetBSD install and
plenty of packages, more than enough for basic services.  However,
I do have a few words of caution there.  Firstly is one of simple
interoperability - I tried soldering on a CF socket to the unused
mounting locations on MY Neoware project that we talked about last
time, along with adding a couple of nearby jumper headers that
turned out to control master/slave selection.  Works fine with a
flash card but completely fails to recognise the microdrive I
fitted.

I don't know exactly why that is - it obviously fits in the socket
and the Neoware (CA21 IIRC) provides the 5V power it needs as
opposed to 3.3V.  There's probably some hack I could make to force
it to work but I never did experiment that far.  However, I did
have success sticking it in a USB enclosure and running from that,
which is what I'll base the rest of my comments on.

The next point is that they seem to be understandably power optimised
in a very aggressive manner - they spin down after perhaps as little
as five SECONDS inactivity.  For something like a root filesystem
that adds a considerable amount of latency since the disk needs to
spin up first for every round of activity.  They also seem to
autopark quite quickly - again that's eminently sensible for the
intended use case but makes them quite "clicky" in operation, which
may not be desirable from an acoustic standpoint.  Nowadays I keep
that to one side as an emergency freestanding boot device, i.e.
something that works properly even if DNS, NIS or whatever is down.

As such I probably wouldn't recommend one which raises the question
of alternatives.  USB drives are cheap enough these days that even
reasonably generous sized drives can be considered consumable -
only last week I bought a pair of of 16GB drives for a combined
&#4294967295;12, which makes arguments about their use one of reliability over
economics.  I've never done it but I don't see why you couldn't
run a pair in RAID 1 configuration using RAIDframe.  You'll need
to devise some method of error reporting though to alert you when
one drive is failing - syslog forwarding would be a start but be
honest, how often do you actually read your logs?  Perhaps a cron
job grepping dmesg for RAIDframe messages and emailing anything it
finds would solve that problem.  You may need to add a bus-powered
hub to get the ports and/or physical space you need, but again
those cost next to nothing these days if you don't already have
one lying around.

One final point regarding emergency access - have you considered
a serial console?  It seems a far better solution than keeping
keyboard, mouse and monitor handy just in case.  Since you're
probably limited to 100Mbit ethernet anyway you wouldn't be losing
anything by running both LAN and console over the same lead with
voice/data splitters at each end.

-- 
Andrew Smallshaw
andrews@sdf.lonestar.org

Hi Andrew,

On 8/28/2014 5:55 PM, Andrew Smallshaw wrote:
> On 2014-08-22, Don Y<this@is.not.me.com>  wrote:
>>
>> I'm trying to replace the box that does most of my basic
>> network services, here:  DNS, BOOTP, DHCP, Font server,
>> NTP, TFTP, etc.
>>
>> All have reasonably light footprints (I think!).  But,
>> all have been written (NetBSD) assuming gobs of memory
>> available!

> I'm a little late into this discussion but since we discussed this
> at length last time around and I still remember a lot of the context
> I'll throw in my two cents...
>
> I take it we're still talking about Neoware (or similar) terminals
> here?  The specs mentioned elsewhere seem to fit that assumption.
> If we're talking about something going under a dresser (on a carpet?)
> I'd hope it's passively cooled to keep the fluff out as well as
> keeping the noise down for fit-and-forget devices such as this.

The old box was a Wyse WT8440XL (~400MHz/256MB) which actually has
provisions for a laptop drive -- in addition to a laptop CD (*and*
the DoC).  Worked for many years.  But, draws a fair bit of power
(it's very warm; power supply is 5V@7A 12V@1A,-12V@0.1A,5VSB@0.5A),
is reasonably large *and* has a whopping big power brick (*9* pin
circular DIN power connector)!

<http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?mode=attach&id=3652&sid=cc7ee792477081536788def2321b5732>

[Location for the CD drive -- and laptop disc behind/below it -- can be
seen where the CF card is present in the above]

<http://www.arcy.com/wyse-power-adapter-77035403.html>

I have several CA10's but they are essentially the same size as the
WYSE and seem like overkill (~1GHz/1-2GB).  I've added a 100G drive to
one of them and had no problems with it -- but prefer not having *that*
running 24/7 (I think it probably draws ~30W when running -- pretty
"rich" for a box that is intended to do very little!)

<http://parkytowers.me.uk/thin/neoware/CA10/imgs/insideL.jpg>

Likewise, some CA5's -- but they are a bit tighter to cram a disk
inside.  OTOH, they don't require an external power brick!

I came across a T5530 in my goody box.  About the same volume as
the CA5 but much faster.  I.e., about half the size of the Wyse and
more performant (in terms of MIPS, USB ports, etc.)

<http://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t5530/imgs/inside.jpg>

I'm on a "downsizing binge" so toss the T5530 *or* keep it and
toss something *else*!  :>

> On a similar vein I've noticed that the cooling on those kinds of
> devices tends to be a lot better when vertically orientated -
> obviously I can't speak for your particular circumstances but I'd
> stop and think whether it can be orientated upright in another
> out of the way location - say understairs or airing cupboard, or
> even wall mounted _behind_ the dresser - with passive cooling you
> really need to help things out as much as possible to maximise
> useful life.

The 8440 was pretty happy under the dresser.  It was a good location
as it was adjacent to a small UPS (intended primarily for it!) as
well as easy to slide a 9" keyboard atop the case for those times
when I needed to "talk to it" ("shutdown -p now" -- easily typed
even w/o a monitor to observe!  :> )

[Fast forwarding ahead... it has been tossed (I pulled the laptop
CD, 2.5" disc and the very low profile 128MB DIMMs).  I managed to
squeeze a 2.5" drive into the T5530 -- barely -- and *it* now is
located UPRIGHT on the far side of the dresser (adjacent to one of
my Phasers) where I can easily get at it (I'm too old to be crawling
under dressers to talk to kit!  :< )]

> As for your substantive question a microdrive style unit (i.e. CF
> interface HDD) is the obvious solution - your capacity is limited
> to around 4 or 5GB but that's room for a full NetBSD install and
> plenty of packages, more than enough for basic services.  However,
> I do have a few words of caution there.  Firstly is one of simple
> interoperability - I tried soldering on a CF socket to the unused
> mounting locations on MY Neoware project that we talked about last
> time, along with adding a couple of nearby jumper headers that
> turned out to control master/slave selection.  Works fine with a
> flash card but completely fails to recognise the microdrive I
> fitted.

Each of my Neowares (as well as all of the boxes that I've discussed
here) has a 44 pin connector on the main board already.  Many of them
have DoM's installed.

One of my CA10's has a PCMCIA slot populated on the main board.

> I don't know exactly why that is - it obviously fits in the socket
> and the Neoware (CA21 IIRC) provides the 5V power it needs as
> opposed to 3.3V.  There's probably some hack I could make to force
> it to work but I never did experiment that far.  However, I did
> have success sticking it in a USB enclosure and running from that,
> which is what I'll base the rest of my comments on.
>
> The next point is that they seem to be understandably power optimised
> in a very aggressive manner - they spin down after perhaps as little
> as five SECONDS inactivity.

Ouch!  I hadn't considered that!  I've had laptop drives spin down
"too often" -- but never anywhere near that quickly!  I.e., you'd
have to write a daemon to just keep tickling the drive to keep
it spun up!

> For something like a root filesystem
> that adds a considerable amount of latency since the disk needs to
> spin up first for every round of activity.  They also seem to
> autopark quite quickly - again that's eminently sensible for the
> intended use case but makes them quite "clicky" in operation, which
> may not be desirable from an acoustic standpoint.  Nowadays I keep
> that to one side as an emergency freestanding boot device, i.e.
> something that works properly even if DNS, NIS or whatever is down.

Makes sense.  *That* is the problem -- I rely on this box for
*everything*.  And, have all my other services configured to assume
*it's* services are always available (e.g., reverse lookups on IP's
for telnet/ftp/etc. sessions on other boxes -- as well as resolving
the names of the ftp host I'm trying to contact!)

For example, when I took the WT8440XL down and started building a disk
for the T5530 (mounting the drive in another NetBSD box and copying the
files over "at bus speed" instead of "over the wire"), I was puzzled as 
to why I couldn't xdm to that (headless) NetBSD box!  Even moreso
when I couldn't *telnet* to it!!  Or *ping* it!!  :-/

("Oh, crap!  Off the top of my head, what's the IP of 'Tennessee'?")

> As such I probably wouldn't recommend one which raises the question
> of alternatives.  USB drives are cheap enough these days that even
> reasonably generous sized drives can be considered consumable -
> only last week I bought a pair of of 16GB drives for a combined
> &pound;12, which makes arguments about their use one of reliability over
> economics.  I've never done it but I don't see why you couldn't
> run a pair in RAID 1 configuration using RAIDframe.

T5530 has provisions for two *internal* USB devices (conveniently
limited to the size of thumb drives) in addition to the externally
accessible USB ports.

My current plan (now that I am not time constrained by "needing an
answer, NOW!") is to move the system onto *a* thumb drive (I assume
I can just treat the thumb drive as any other "disk"?  I.e., do the
fdisk/disklabel/newfs dance) and leave swap on the rotating media
(i.e., until I am sure the USB device can be mounted R/O).

Then, replace the disk with a CF card -- presumably it would be faster
than a thumb drive (?) in random access (e.g., as swap).

Then, try replacing the CF card with a *second* thumb drive that
is JUST for swap.

[Does this make sense?]

The tricky part will be determining when the swap device is no longer
reliable -- and trying to painlessly recover from that.  I.e., I
can't just modify /etc/rc to fall back to key services in the absence
of swap -- as I'll never really be able to tell if swap is "dead"!

> You'll need
> to devise some method of error reporting though to alert you when
> one drive is failing - syslog forwarding would be a start but be
> honest, how often do you actually read your logs?

Anything "important" gets mailed by services -- of course, this
same box acts as my POP/SMTP service so I have to rely on it
being operational to figure out what *other* things aren't working!

> Perhaps a cron
> job grepping dmesg for RAIDframe messages and emailing anything it
> finds would solve that problem.  You may need to add a bus-powered
> hub to get the ports and/or physical space you need, but again
> those cost next to nothing these days if you don't already have
> one lying around.

I'd prefer NOT having to rely on an external box.  While the T5530's
brick is much smaller than the WT8440XL's, it's still "yet another
box" (The CA5's would have been ideal -- but they are dog slow and
hard to cram anything inside).  Having to add an external drive just
means more clutter.

[The T5530 is delightfully small when contrasted to the Wyse box.
And, reasonably speedy -- a fresh kernel build from "make config"
is just two or three minutes!]

> One final point regarding emergency access - have you considered
> a serial console?  It seems a far better solution than keeping
> keyboard, mouse and monitor handy just in case.

A couple of my boxes have *only* a serial console -- no video
hardware at all!  Each time I boot one of them, I (almost literally)
hold my breath until it goes multiuser (and I can telnet into it).
I keep a small laptop for use with a terminal emulator in those
cases (the serial ports on other machines from which I might tip(1)
are hard to access -- as are the serial ports on the headless boxes).

Each serial console box has a permanently attached serial cable
labeled with the protocol requirements -- data rate, character
format, account name/password, etc. (e.g., the Netra needs the
serial console *pre*boot, at times!)

Bottom line, the serial consoles just leave me with one more source
of anxiety.  Instead, I keep a 7" monitor and 9" keyboard in a small
bag and carry them to whichever machine is *operating* "headless"
(but capable of handling a monitor!) as the need arises -- as I will
for the T5530.

> Since you're
> probably limited to 100Mbit ethernet anyway you wouldn't be losing
> anything by running both LAN and console over the same lead with
> voice/data splitters at each end.

(sigh)  Solution is to continue shedding kit!  E.g., I've got ~24
drops in the office, alone!  <frown>

Next, I'll sort out how to PXE boot an X-server on the CA10's and
try to get rid of the "email/web" type machines around here (hoping
for a more robust/secure implementation!)

On 8/28/2014 7:17 PM, Don Y wrote:
> Next, I'll sort out how to PXE boot an X-server on the CA10's and
> try to get rid of the "email/web" type machines around here (hoping
> for a more robust/secure implementation!)

BTW, do you know if the DVI+HD15 CA10's can run dual headed?  Or,
is the DVI connector just a "convenience" for folks with monitors
without HD15's?

On 2014-08-29, Don Y <this@is.not.me.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/2014 7:17 PM, Don Y wrote:
>> Next, I'll sort out how to PXE boot an X-server on the CA10's and
>> try to get rid of the "email/web" type machines around here (hoping
>> for a more robust/secure implementation!)
>
> BTW, do you know if the DVI+HD15 CA10's can run dual headed?  Or,
> is the DVI connector just a "convenience" for folks with monitors
> without HD15's?

From memory that'll be a VIA Chrome chip in which case no.  At
least that's the way it was with the VIA EPIA boards of that era
which seem to be a productised reference design, in that there's
a 1:1 equivalence in support chips between the Neoware mainboards
and the equivalent EPIA.  It's a little more than mere convenience
in that it does generate a digital out, but the displays are clones
of each other right down to signal timing.

I'll reply to your other post tomorrow, it's getting pretty late
here now.

-- 
Andrew Smallshaw
andrews@sdf.lonestar.org

edward.ming.lee@gmail.com wrote:
> Theo wrote:
> > So you're running on an old netbook?  That doesn't sound like 'wasting
> > resources' - like my router it was going spare.  But they're different
> > things: I doubt your netbook's wifi would manage a whole city block
> > (which my router didn't quite do either, but would have been handy).
> 
> I think i could, in theory. ;-)  With three devices connected, the Wifi
> server proc (hostapd) never get much more than 1% usage.  So, it could
> support at least 100 devices.  Perhaps someday, i'll try it and see how
> many can connect to it in public.

I suspect the wifi from the little patch antenna mounted in the screen might
not do so well in terms of signal strength compared to something with an
external antenna.

> The argument against using PC/laptops vs. COT routers has been price and
> power consumption.  These old netbooks can beat/match COT routers with
> around $50 and 5W.

Bit tricky to nail a netbook to the wall.  And the 'locals' may take an
unhealthy interest when they see a 'free' laptop.  Like I said, this was a
'hostile' environment.  Did I mention ambient temperatures of 50degC? 
That's where power consumption really bites, because cooling just isn't
there.

Theo