Josh Kendall

If you’ve seen my website in the last few months you can clearly see it once again looks different. I’ve decided to drop my custom design that I’ve never been happy with and start fresh using Twitter’s Bootstrap toolkit and their example “Hero” layout. I wanted to stay on Jekyll and I wanted something easy to read, Bootstrap meets those goals and has given me a solid starting point for customization. Bootstrap has been so easy to implement that it’s likely going to be the starting point for all of my projects.

With the new site comes some content changes, old posts have been reformatted and have shorter titles to fit the new design. I’m also going to try and post more often on development topics as well as general business topics as I start my new company.

Well, I ordered a AirPort Express on Saturday to implement my plan, it arrived today and I proceeded to set it up and move my hard drives and server across the office. There were multiple problems with my original plan and how it gets implemented. The big one being that AirPort Express only supports a printer on the USB port, AirPort Extreme base stations and Time Capsules apparently supported hard drives.

Besides that issue (which is noted on the site) I had issues setting the Express up. To extend your network you’ll need to tell the Express to join your existing network and it’ll restart with that info. I had to reset my Express twice because it wasn’t showing up in AirPort Utility. After I had that setup I needed to get my server accessible remotely; I had this working on Saturday but managed to screw it up somehow.

While messing with the AirPort Express I found I could connect to my server while on the network via SSH, it was just while not on the network that I couldn’t. After some testing I realized I couldn’t ping any sites, while digging through `/etc/network/interfaces` I converted my server back to using DHCP from a static IP. While walking through setting up the static IP again I realized I was missing the broadcast and gateway addresses. The reason `ddclient` couldn’t find any hosts in my DynDNS account was because there was no internet connection to the server.

If you’re setting up an Ubuntu server with DynDNS and `ddclient` your `/etc/network/interfaces` file should look similar to this:

Now my server is accessible remotely and is conveniently across the room away from my desk. I’ve still got to figure out this hard drive situation. I don’t have room on my desk for all 4 of them nor the power outlets necessary, a surge protector would solve that issue, but the goal was to reduce the cables around my desk. I might just pick up a AirPort Extreme at some point and the Express would just come home so my Xbox 360 can connect to the internet or I’m sure I can find a use for it elsewhere in the office.

I’m sitting in my office at 7:50am on a Saturday morning messing with the server trying to get it setup for remote access from home and I realized just how crappy the area I’m working in is network wise. I have internet through a cable provider which means my setup is a Motorola cable modem and a Linksys WRT54G. The wireless works great and everything in general is fine, however since the office space is rented I had no choice in where the was installed at in the room. It’s inconveniently located very close to the phone and fax lines which means there’s a lot of cables in one area. My desk is also in this area and with a monitor, laptop, USB hub and 4 external Iomega Prestige drives means even more cables. Oh, and the new local server is currently sitting on my desk since it doesn’t have wireless and it’s the only place I can put it without running a network cable across the room either around the base board (very long cable) or directly across the floor (foot traffic + cable = tragic early demise).

So I had this thought, actually thoughts; what if I buy a Airport Express Base Station, plug my server into the network port, my USB hub (with hard drives) into the USB port and move the entire thing across the room. It would let me move my desk to anywhere I wanted and I can easily move the server and hard drives to another spot if I need to later. The internet and fax could stay where they are and there would be less cable clutter in one location.

The only problem I have is that I don’t know if I can plug the USB hub into the base station and still access my drives as easily as I was. One is a time machine drive so I know that will work. Does anyone know if this idea of mine will work, or should I look elsewhere for a solution?

I love my Rackspace Cloud servers, but I’ve been thinking I need a local server where I can have complete control, there isn’t a monthly charge and their isn’t an additional fee if I want to use RHEL or Windows. I had to ask myself some questions that at times were hard to answer due to the fact that I wanted the server to have a small form factor (traditional micro and mini tower’s were too large), not require a server rack and be easy to upgrade.

The Questions I Asked Myself

What do I actually need this server to handle?: PHP, Ruby, MySQL and Python

How fast do I want this server to be?: Memory wise I wanted to have at least 4GB’s of RAM with the option to add more. Processor wise I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted, I was thinking around 2.8-3.0Ghz

Which brand do I want?: I was looking at Dell or HP since a lot of companies use them for their web servers. I also looked at IBM and Lenovo, neither were in my price range.

Which OS do I want?: This is where my choice became difficult, I wanted Ubuntu and most computer companies ship computers with Windows (even servers). I don’t want Windows, I won’t use it and why should I have to pay for it when I’m going to put Ubuntu on it?

The Decision

At the end of the day I had bounced between Dell, HP, Lenovo and IBM’s websites a lot comparing servers and even standard desktops, after all of the comparing I couldn’t pick one to order that wasn’t going to make me regret it. This is a big business decision after all, I can’t just trash this after a week and create another like I can with a cloud server, I’m stuck with this thing until either it’s EOL (determined by it’s components) or until I sell it and get something better.

My final decision was to build my own, this had it’s own issues because I really wanted the Habey RPC-800 server chassis, but it’s a rack mounted chassis and I would have needed to buy a small rack too. I ended up going with a Shuttle barebones kit since it meets my needs (small, upgradable, desktop ready) and it was relatively inexpensive. Below is a breakdown of what my server will have once it all arrives and I install everything.

The Breakdown

• Shuttle SH55-J2-BK-V1 Chassis
• Intel Core i3-550 Clarkdale 3.2GHz 4MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 73W Dual-Core Desktop Processor BX80616I3550
• SAMSUNG Black DVD Burner
• Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
• 2x Western Digital Caviar Blue WDBAAX3200ENC-NRSN 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5” Internal Hard Drive

I bought everything at NewEgg because they had everything there and I didn’t want to rack up a bunch of shipping fees from different places. The Shuttle chassis has a motherboard that required an iX processor from Intel, I really wanted just a Core 2 Duo but in order to get the memory in it I wanted I would have had to spend about $500 on the chassis alone. I went with a 3.2Ghz i3-550 Clarkdale because it was only $8-9 more than the 3.0Ghz one and I needed a i3-5xx series in order to use the internal video outputs. I opted for two 320GB HDD’s because I’m going to set them up as a RAID-1 array so I have a complete backup. The memory was an easy choice, I put Kingston RAM in my MacBook Pro and haven’t had any issues, so it made sense to go in my server. This server actually supports 16GB’s of RAM, but to save money I opted for only 8GB’s now. I can always pick up more RAM at a later date.

So, how much did this cost? $590.62. My original goal was a $200-300 system but once I realized it was going to be much more to get the pre-built system I wanted from one of the major companies it’s not a bad price at all. If we look at how much a Rackspace Cloud server costs with comparable memory and storage we’re looking at $0.48/hr or $350.40/month; so at the current setup it’s the same as running a 8GB cloud server for 1.7 months. When I upgrade to 16GB’s of memory, it’s going to cost me about another $100.00 which makes my total $690.62 for the system. If I was running the maxed out cloud server for one month it would be $700.80, so I actually save $10.18. if you figure in running that same maxed out server for a year that’s $8,409.60 which saves me $7,718.98 in just a single year.

Everything should be here by the end of the week so I should have a new local Ubuntu server running by Monday.