Dead Ink Vinyl

With my new, static IP addresses, I’ve started kicking around the possibility of running a public server. I don’t know for what exactly I’d run the server. Possibilties include running Subversion, an OpenLaszlo project gallery, an Echo2 project gallery, or a Confluence knowledgebase for the Echo community. Since I don’t need to run a server — I just want a server — I don’t want to spend a lot of money. In fact, I want to spend as little money as possible.

I donated all of my old computer equipment to a local school system last year, so a new server means new kit. Thinking of a Linux server, I looked up Dell‘s offerings, since I get an employee discount with them. It would be $420 + shipping for the lowest-end box they offer. That’s close enough to the price of a Mac mini (with my employee discount) that I seriously contemplated that angle. Still, the $400+ price range is more than I want to invest in this project at this time.

Then I recalled that the Linksys NSLU2 can be hacked to upgrade its Linux kernel and services. I want to keep my current NSLU2 as a file server for my home network, so I would need a new NSLU2 ($80) and a small, external USB2 hard drive ($80). That’s more in line with my price range. Looking over the NSLU2-Linux sites, it certainly runs Web servers serving static content just fine. But does it run Java?

The NSLU2 runs on an Intel IXP425 Xscale CPU. I was unaware of any Java runtimes for the processor until I came across Kaffe. This is not the first time I’ve heard of Kaffe, but it is the first time I’ve seriously considered it. This thread indicates that the newest versions (1.1.4) should build on NSLU2-Linux. Kaffe’s compatability reports indicate that it should be suitable for server-side applications. Intrigued, I dug further and found some hope that Tomcat will run on Kaffe with minimal tweaking.

So I’ll sleep on it a while and revisit the idea of setting up a Servlet server on an NSLU2 “soon”.

I should share that I did not have luck using ext2fsx (ext2 support for MacOSX) to read my drive formatted (as ext3) by my Linksys NSLU2. However, other people report success using this utility for this purpose (see batbox.org on 10-Jul-2004), so I may have been hasty. In the “I just want it to work” mentality into which I’m growing, I gave up and plugged the old drive and new drive into the NSLU2 and let it do the synchronization. The old drive lasted long enough to get its contents copied off, but the noise was teeth grating.

I have left the extension installed on my laptop and have not suffered any instability or problems as a result. And I like the idea of being able to read Linux partitions from my laptop in a crunch.

Let me get right to it: do not purchase ACOM Data hard drives! I picked up two USB2/Firewire 80GB 7200RPM drives very inexpensively at CompUSA about a year ago and I can say that the fans used are incredibly shoddy.

I had the drives hooked up to my LinkSys NSLU2 NAS controller. I love the NSLU2. It’s a sub-$100 NAS device that provides permission-based SMB (Windows file sharing) access to two USB2.0 hard drives. It is very small, runs Linux, and is very easy to control.

Anyway, I had the two ACOM Data drives attached to the NSLU2. I didn’t trust the drives, so I setup the NSLU2 to use one as a backup drive for the other. I dumped all kinds of content onto the NAS to be shared between my Dell (WinXP) and PowerBook (MacOSX) computers. Since both computers are locked-down and running their own firewalls, it’s next to impossible to get them to share files directly. Thus, the NAS filer is a very nice solution.

The fan died on the first ACOM Data drive several months ago. Cracking the hard drive’s case is next to impossible without breaking everything (it’s all plastic without screws), so left the drive for dead. A month ago the other drive’s fan gave out. I picked up a nice LaCie drive to replace the two ACOM duds. Now I attempting to get the data off the old drive and onto the new one.

Here is where the Linux under-pinnings of the NSLU2 became a liability. The NSLU2 uses the EXT3 filesystem common to Linux. It’s a great filesystem, but I happen to no longer have a Linux workstation or server in my residence. I could plug both drives into the NSLU2 and use its interface to copy over the contents, but I would like more fine-grain control over the process to copy the most important content first. That’s the degree to which I distrust the ACOM Data drive lasting through the operation.

I thought I was in good shape because I have a KNOPPIX 3.7 CD. I’d never used it, but I’d read such good things about it… Well, it doesn’t boot on my Dell box. It gets past the LILO prompt and starts recognizing hardware, but it quickly kernel panics that it cannot read init. Hmph. I’m grabbing build 02 of 3.7, which may work better. In the mean time, I am fanning the flame of hope that I’ll find a way to read EXT3 under MacOSX. I’m giving Mac OS X Ext2 Filesystem a shot.