Well after a lot of research and hard work the server's ready to drop off at colocation. There's still some grey areas but in all everything looks ready to go, better off there and running than sitting it home waiting.

So tomorrow I'll be driving down to RapidSwitch in Slough to drop it off, after which Michelle wants us to visit her grandparents who live in Farnborough; not far off from the facility.

Here's a quick rundown of the spec:

• O/S: Debian Etch 4.0 64-bit
• HDD: Software RAID 1 - 1TB
• MEMORY: 4GB Corsair
• CPU: AMD AM2 2+ghz
• BANDWIDTH: 3TB per month

Bit of a step up from the virtual server environment I get from SliceHost, but fingers crossed it should all go fine; had so much fun putting it together already planning the next incarnation ;-)

P.S.

Dark Knight is really really good, Heath Ledger has pulled off such a believable and terrifying character; have to see it again.

Update

Just got back from her grandparents; boy do they know how to cook a sunday lunch, lovely couple.

Server's online, it's stopped resyncing the raid drives thankfully, was a little worried about that but everythings loaded running and operating well.

Cat sitting next weekend, let's hope mickey isn't in one of his moods ;-)

All the best, have a great week people.

Over the weekend I went thru the process of setting up and installing the O/S on my private server preparing it for colocating. During this I wanted to bind the twin 1TB drives together in a RAID 1 configuration. Now the ASUS BIOS has the facility to do this at the hardware level but by doing so it ties you down to the physical setup you used to build it. However Linux provides the facility to do this at the software level without the ties which both alleviates you from the reliance and provides you with a more manageable alternative.

However for the uninitiated it's nowhere as simple, what follows is a short guide to setup a simple twin drive software RAID solution; handle with care.

Fedora Unity

Before I start, get a copy of Fedora Unity. It's basically Fedora 8 with more stable drivers and packages. I was speaking with one of my friends last week and he suggested using it for this very same reason, and although Debian does the same it is nowhere near as up-to-date.

• Fedora Unity

Grab the latest distro and burn it to a blank DVD, it's about 4.3gb in size so if your downloading I'd leave it going for the night.

Software RAID with LINUX

Once you've burned it to DVD, boot your machine up and go thru the install process, this example obviously assumes you have 2 identical drives but there's no stopping you using this to build a more advanced RAID setup later on.

Fedora has a pretty good partition manager which'll help you out a lot, so when it prompts you to decide on your partition layout, choose 'manual' and we'll begin;

• On the first drive,
• Create a software [raid] partition of 100mb (we'll use this for /boot).

• Create a second software [raid] partition using all the remaining space.

• Select [raid] again and clone the first drive layout to the second drive.

Now next time you select [raid] it'll give you the option to create a raid device, binding both discs together for each partition.

• So, create a [raid] device using the ext3 filesystem, mount point '/boot', raid level 1, with raid members of 100mb in size (the two small partitions we created at the start), specify it to use both 100mb members (sda1 & sdb1).
• For the second partition I'm creating a LVM partition for the rest of the filesystem and the swapfile,

• So create a second [raid] device, file type LVM, raid level 1, using the two large members (sda2 & sdb2).

• Afterwards select [LVM] in the options panel and define your LVM group.

• Make an LVM volume group, e.g. 'lvmgroup'.
• Next add a volume to the group, mount point '/', file system ext3, lvm name 'lvmroot', using all the space (- 10gb for the swap partition).
• Next add a second volume to the lvm group, file system 'swap', lvm name 'lvmswap', using the remaining 10gb.

Click [finish] and you're done.

Setup your network settings and go make a coffee, Fedora takes a while to build the partitions and install the packages but afterwards you should be left with a pretty stable setup.

I built two partitions (boot & lvm) because I was informed this provides a more stable setup, if one boot partition goes down the other should kick in, providing some degree of failover.

Also creating an LVM group makes your filesystem more manageable and not so hard-wired so if you do need to do changes down the line you can.

Beyond that I'm going to leave in a copy of the Fedora LiveCD so I can boot from that if things get really hairy, I'm going to run the system headless with SSH access so Gnome isn't a necessity but for now it'll help in the system build.

All the best,

Update

One thing to remember is to make sure /boot is marked as bootable on both discs otherwise if you remove one the other won't kick in.

Shocked my boss yesterday after telling him i'm building my own rackmount server, well i've built machines for about 20 years and most of those have been custom jobs with 3 running Ubuntu Server for my Rails projects so doing this is the next logical step.

Here's the things I've dug up, which should help you out if you ever decide to go down the same route.

Co-location + Power Limit

For this I've found a company in Manchester (uk) who will host it for me at £32 a-month as long as the power usage doesn't spike over 0.5A

So with a few calculations, that gives me...

0.5a => 120 watts

The company is called RapidSwitch

Case

Next up the case and I've gone for a SuperMicro 1U case, problem is I need specific boards to slide in and so this...

M2N-MX SE Plus

But still looking around for the perfect fit.

Processor

This will probably be an AMD 64 dual core CPU, as they're power efficient, reliable and the O/S i'm choosing (Fedora 8) fits rather well with them.

PSU

For this I'm sourcing the most power efficient model as most PSU's only run at 50-60% operating efficiency.

• Sparkle 1U 220W ATX

CPU Heatsink

ThermalTake have a good array at...

• ThermalTake 1U Coolers

Not sure about the availability but your 1U case is 1.75" high so it's a big factor.

HDD

I'm picking 2x 500gb Western Digital Caviar drives, I've always used them, they're not special but reliable.

This'll go in a RAID 1 configuration similar to my NAS box at home, doubling the HDD read speed but lowering the write speed due to the mirroring, reliable though.

Memory

2 sticks of 2gb memory, I'd choose Samsung as they're cheap and just work but having trouble sourcing the OEM sticks, may just go with some corsair sticks.

Power Calculator

Found a power calculator which should give me a judge on how much power I'm gonna be using,

• Power Calculator

Probably not that accurate but gives me a ballpark figure, with the hardware I've chosen:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ 2600 CPU AM2
• 2x WD SATA Drives
• 2x DDR2 2GB Sticks
• (graphics card on-chipset)
• 1x 80mm fan, 2x 120mm fans

All comes up to needing a PSU of 177 watts, which fits in with my Sparkle low-power 220w PSU but might be a might too high for the power coming in.

Finally

It's a learning process and one that'll probably not be as easy as it looks but worth the effort for the experience.