Asus P5B

Xen on an Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard

Posted Tue, May 8th, 2007 - 22:05 by michielf
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On Jan 2nd, my server was compromised using a vulnerability in my cacti installation. This machine hosts all my files, my emails, my photo's, but also serves as mythbackend and asterisk voip server and therefore, I have to admit that I felt quite exposed after this event (although, to my best knowledge, no files were changed and only a spambot was listening).

I decided to upgrade my server and use Xen to logically separate the different functions from each other. I'm an enthusiastic Gentoo user for the last 4 years, so I used that distribution as a foundation.

One of the first challenges was to get the kernel to work with all the new hardware. When I first installed Xen, the latest version in portage was 3.0.2 with kernel 2.6.16.28. This kernel still had some issues with regards to the ATAPI support in libsata:


Feb 16 16:10:50 skadi kernel: ata5: translated ATA stat/err 0x51/54 to SCSI SK/ASC/ASCQ 0xb/00/00

Linux Server Adventures

Posted Fri, March 30th, 2007 - 21:03 by michielf
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The pieces apartThe pieces apart
Just over three years after I installed my first linux server at home, I decided to replace my old AMD Athlon XP based server with a faster and newer one.

I started compiling a list with components, with these requirements in mind:

  • All components should be as modern as possible: no ATA anymore, no floppy disk and as less PCI card as possible. I tried to replace them in favor of SATA, memory card reader and PCIe.
  • I still need at least 2 PCI slots for my TV card (Hauppauge PVR-500) and my ISDN card
  • Everything well supported under Linux
  • Able to host a lot of disk space. My MythTV recordings, mp3 collection and digital photo archive keeps growing and I had to be more and more creative to fit everything in my old server. So, the more disks the better
  • Enough computing power to transcode video quickly (I tend to recode a lot of Myth recording to be able to view then on my Nokia 770)

This was the result:

  • Antec P180B Case
  • Antec Neo HE 430 Power Supply