I may be about to kill my Alix board… place your bets.

uncompress a .tar.gz

$ tar xvfz <filename.tar.gz>

Just checked on the OpenTTD website and it appears they’ve released another testing version. It’s now a release candidate - so it’s nearly the final product rather then a beta. It’s currently compiling on my test VM at the moment. Figures crossed.

It might be a question of installing the fedora_base then using the binaries. Will see, need to spend some time thinking about it as I’m still a newbie.

Just been doing a bit of math regarding racking Alix boards – with a bit of luck and careful planning you should be able to get 10 per 1u of rack space. You might want to leave an extra 1u for cooling – not that it should be needed, but it might be useful if you want to attach a usb hard drive to them.

A quick google brought up the D-Link DGS-1210-10P. A rather basic switch that supports POE, which should do the job and at £200, isn’t a bad price.

10x ALIX 3D3, with cases and cheap 4gb Compact Flash card is just over £1,300. Tack on   another £50 for the cat5e cables, USB-RS232 cables, a 10port active (powered) USB hub – check it actually gives you 10 extra ports and not just 9. It’s also important to put the boards in cases, accidents can and do happen. If you’re bulk buying the case, they do offer a custom case solution so you can display your name, you might also want to look at getting an extra cut out so you can remove the compact flash card without having to re-open the case.

The biggest problem with this idea is that your going to need to get a custom rack shelf made. OK, you could buy a standard 1u fixed shelf, but then your eating into your space, you want a thin deep shelf that is – and this is important – on sliding rails. This is vital if your planning on filling a rack and your not going to have a lot of head room. It’s possible to get a sheet of metal cut to the correct size, and bent into a U spade, you ideally want to leave a bit of room so you can attach rack rails – it’s generally going to be cheaper to buy a generic set off eBay or such.

The final solution will end up giving you 10 servers requiring 2 PDU connections (1 USB hub which you could get around and 1 for the switch) and 1 USB port on the terminal server. This brings me onto one other problem – other then the missing extra network port need for the uplink. Your going to need a terminal server, so you’ll lose a server, but if you’re having say 10u worth of servers, that’s not too bad – 1 terminal server for every 100 servers! This could also act as a DNS server – I wouldn’t however recommend it.

So for 100 servers, you might just about be able to squeeze it into a quarter rack – about £300pm – so for 1 year, hw + colo costs your looking at around £20,100. For 100 servers!!

That’s about £201 per server for the first year. 2yr-3yr+ will be the cash years, £36 per year per server. So if you plan to do it over 3 years, your looking at £91 per server per year or £7.59 per month.

I wasn’t able to source a serial cable locally – not without selling my arms and legs to maplins. So I ordered from eBay, ok I could have got one from one of the many online stores, but for 99p, you can’t really complain. I also ordered one with a RS232 to USB, a bit more at £1.88, but hey if it works with linux, I could end up with a cheap console server solution

Plan is to setup the BIOS to redirect it’s IO to the serial port along with the OS – that way I could make use of Mythic-Beasts console server… for a few extra £ of course.

Expanding on last nights work – I’ve added the admin users to the class – staff. This group – by default in OpenBSD ignores the /etc/nologin file. This can be done via:

$ sudo usermod -L staff <username>

This also gives it a few more benefits. I have however add the PATH settings from the default class.

In addition to this I’ve add /etc/nologin.txt – this doesn’t appear to be displayed over SSH, at least not in putty.

My plan tonight was to try and setup Alix box to use com0 rather then the console – so that I can\could use a serial console when it gets colo’d. Problem was, I couldn’t get logged in to even try and set this up. I kept getting the following message despite not having any pending shutdowns.

NO LOGINS: System going down at 01:00

It appears to be because /etc/nologin exists. Basically it gets created but it then can’t delete it later because the filesystem is mounted as read-only. Basically not re-mounted the filesystem as read-only before issuing the shutdown commands = no more logins. The way out of it is to reboot and going into single user mode, delete the file and reboot. As a fail safe (and a quick fix) I’ve stuck in rm /etc/nologin in the /etc/rc.shutdown script.

Lesson learnt.

Was planning to go to bed early, lately I’ve been struggling to get motivated so catching up on my sleep seemed like a good idea. Well I’ve failed.

I’ve created a virtual OpenBSD system to try and build OpenTTD 1.1.5 so I can create a package for my Alix system. Seeming as no-one has done it already – or at least not willing to share. Only to find out it’s been done.

Only problem is I keep getting an error:

Can’t install openttd-1.1.5: can’t resolve gtk-update-icon-cache-2.24.9

Been trying to find the OpenBSD file structure system, so I know where stuff should go – well it’s hier(7).

I have a 1st gen iPod Nano – which Apple are doing a free battery replacement on at the moment due to a fire hazard. Finally got round to doing it, I should get a RMA box sent out soon… I hope.

Fingers crossed it’ll go well – not sure how well it’ll turn out – being free and all. Maybe I need more faith in the world.