Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
On Sep 3, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Charles Scott wrote: Gary: Well, it's kind of a Tim The Tool Man Taylor tendency I have. I did, however look at the Icom specs for the gateway system and it says 2.4 GHz and 512 MB, so I'm not even an order of magnitude over that, which would be the Tim thing to do. I also considered fan-less 12V computer boards, but for what I paid for these systems, I couldn't buy a new one of those boards. The nice thing about this system is that it has redundant supplies, BIOS, drive array, fans, and so on so it shouldn't go down with common failures. It also has integrated lights-out management, so I can can talk to it over the network even when it's shut down to restart it, reboot, or diagnose problems remotely. The other nice thing is that they show up regularly on E-Bay at prices less than a cheap PC at Walmart. (It's a DL385 G1.) If nothing else, I could chew up some CPU cycles doing s...@home or some such thing, but the IRLP computer did end up with a bunch of things running on it also, and I suspect this will be the same. I even thought of installing VMWare on it and running both the D-Star gateway and IRLP in separate virtual machines, but I'd have to get more memory in it to do that well. Chuck Think about doing RAID1 and having two disks in it if it's inaccessible for 1/2 of the year. Disclaimer: I did this with W0CDS, which lives on top of a very high mountain -- and it still bit me in the hindquarters. Linux Software RAID1 isn't 100% ready-for-prime-time, sadly, after all of these years. The machine lost a drive, and instead of just chugging along, it started throwing I/O errors for all commands. Luckily, the RAID was working, it just never detected the failed disk. A power off/power on reboot cleared that problem and it came right back online with a single disk and one in a failed state in /proc/mdstat -- so that leads to item #2... Get a way to remotely REBOOT your system... be it a transistor switch on a co-located analog repeater controller, a remote power on/off device like a managed power strip, whatever works that you trust and can access when the box is down. That would have saved someone a trip to the mountain. But he went, we proved the machine would run on one dead drive and one live drive, and then he yanked the dead one to bring it down to get a replacement. Which leads to item #3... Since Linux Software RAID can work with, but really really really likes drives of the exact same CHS layout and size... get a couple of spares. Drive technology is still changing so fast, that by the time you need it, that model will be hard to find. Drives are cheap, keep spares if you're using RAID, or be prepared to backup/rebuild the system from scratch with two new drives when one finally fails. The reason for the drive failure we suspect is two-fold... high altitude (heat, less air between the spinning disk and the flying head, etc) and really bad power up there. Lightning wreaks havok with everything up there every summer, and apparently this drive died too soon into its usual life-span because of all the power hits. Even once we had a UPS inline, the stuff' that comes in on the power lines up there is just utter trash all summer long. It's just a tough environment for PCs. If you're building from scratch and don't mind the eventual performance hit and need to do a secure wipe and reload once in a while, the modern Solid State Drives are a good choice for a difficult site, I think. But their internal fragmentation problems and limits are becoming well-documented, and that secure wipe to get them to go rewrite every bit of the flash and reset the controller that's managing the flash, is important for most brands. Some good reviews of cheap vs. server grade SSDs are starting to show up on the web in droves now, whereas for a few years there, the testing and performance numbers just weren't available. I'd say it's a toss-up between spinning platter and SSD, when you factor in price. Cheaper than owning two SSD's is owning four mid-sized spinning platter technology drives, so you'll have to decide if you want to pay the premium and be an early-adopter, so to speak. -- Nate Duehr n...@natetech.com facebook.com/denverpilot twitter.com/denverpilot
Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
On Mon, 2010-09-06 at 03:12 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote: Luckily, the RAID was working, it just never detected the failed disk. A power off/power on reboot cleared that problem and it came right back online with a single disk and one in a failed state in /proc/mdstat -- so that leads to item #2... Google Linux swap on raid using mdtools. I had issue where I did not RAID1 the swap. If the box used it and if the drive failed this caused issues that did not permit the box to continue to operate.
Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
Nate: Yep, since the system only had 2 drives I have it set for redundancy rather than space (it has an integrated RAID controller). It can therefore loose a drive and continue to run without the software knowing what happened (although I will). The better way to do it would be to throw in 6 drives so I could have a couple fail, which is what we do with our servers. Found one on E-Bay with 6 32G drives the other day for $99 and it still had dual supplies and everything. These are a great value but way to noisy to run in my shack! They do, however make great Web servers with 4 cores (2 processors) 6 drives, and a bunch of memory and I can get those configurations for about 1/10 the cost of current production systems. Yes again, since the system has integrated lights out management that uses a separate (third) Ethernet connector, you can connect to it even when the system is off or is otherwise not responding and turn it on, reboot it, or look for problems. That seems to be perfect for difficult to reach repeater sites. As to SSD and such, my preference would be to spend less than the cost of one SSD and get multiple complete systems like these DL385's. Could then either run them in some full redundancy configuration or simply leave one off till the primary fails then turn it on remotely. Could bring the spare up periodically to update it if necessary and never go to the site. The only thing left to do would be dual Broadband feeds and redundant switches, but that seems like overkill for Ham stuff. The problem I see with all this is that these kinds of deal systems will become popular for this type of application and I won't be able to get them cheap anymore. So everyone please ignore this thread! Chuck - N8DNX On 9/6/2010 5:12 AM, Nate Duehr wrote: Think about doing RAID1 and having two disks in it if it's inaccessible for 1/2 of the year. Disclaimer: I did this with W0CDS, which lives on top of a very high mountain -- and it still bit me in the hindquarters. Linux Software RAID1 isn't 100% ready-for-prime-time, sadly, after all of these years. The machine lost a drive, and instead of just chugging along, it started throwing I/O errors for all commands. Luckily, the RAID was working, it just never detected the failed disk. A power off/power on reboot cleared that problem and it came right back online with a single disk and one in a failed state in /proc/mdstat -- so that leads to item #2... Get a way to remotely REBOOT your system... be it a transistor switch on a co-located analog repeater controller, a remote power on/off device like a managed power strip, whatever works that you trust and can access when the box is down. That would have saved someone a trip to the mountain. But he went, we proved the machine would run on one dead drive and one live drive, and then he yanked the dead one to bring it down to get a replacement. Which leads to item #3... Since Linux Software RAID can work with, but really really really likes drives of the exact same CHS layout and size... get a couple of spares. Drive technology is still changing so fast, that by the time you need it, that model will be hard to find. Drives are cheap, keep spares if you're using RAID, or be prepared to backup/rebuild the system from scratch with two new drives when one finally fails. The reason for the drive failure we suspect is two-fold... high altitude (heat, less air between the spinning disk and the flying head, etc) and really bad power up there. Lightning wreaks havok with everything up there every summer, and apparently this drive died too soon into its usual life-span because of all the power hits. Even once we had a UPS inline, the stuff' that comes in on the power lines up there is just utter trash all summer long. It's just a tough environment for PCs. If you're building from scratch and don't mind the eventual performance hit and need to do a secure wipe and reload once in a while, the modern Solid State Drives are a good choice for a difficult site, I think. But their internal fragmentation problems and limits are becoming well-documented, and that secure wipe to get them to go rewrite every bit of the flash and reset the controller that's managing the flash, is important for most brands. Some good reviews of cheap vs. server grade SSDs are starting to show up on the web in droves now, whereas for a few years there, the testing and performance numbers just weren't available. I'd say it's a toss-up between spinning platter and SSD, when you factor in price. Cheaper than owning two SSD's is owning four mid-sized spinning platter technology drives, so you'll have to decide if you want to pay the premium and be an early-adopter, so to speak. -- Nate Duehr n...@natetech.com facebook.com/denverpilot twitter.com/denverpilot Please TRIM your replies or set
Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
Nate and Charles -- This is a fascinating and educational thread. Lots of interesting and useful info from people with plenty of experience. Thanks for sharing with the rest of us. Jim - K6JM - Original Message - From: Charles Scott To: dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, September 06, 2010 6:04 AM Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements Nate: Yep, since the system only had 2 drives I have it set for redundancy rather than space (it has an integrated RAID controller). It can therefore loose a drive and continue to run without the software knowing what happened (although I will). The better way to do it would be to throw in 6 drives so I could have a couple fail, which is what we do with our servers. Found one on E-Bay with 6 32G drives the other day for $99 and it still had dual supplies and everything. These are a great value but way to noisy to run in my shack! They do, however make great Web servers with 4 cores (2 processors) 6 drives, and a bunch of memory and I can get those configurations for about 1/10 the cost of current production systems. Yes again, since the system has integrated lights out management that uses a separate (third) Ethernet connector, you can connect to it even when the system is off or is otherwise not responding and turn it on, reboot it, or look for problems. That seems to be perfect for difficult to reach repeater sites. As to SSD and such, my preference would be to spend less than the cost of one SSD and get multiple complete systems like these DL385's. Could then either run them in some full redundancy configuration or simply leave one off till the primary fails then turn it on remotely. Could bring the spare up periodically to update it if necessary and never go to the site. The only thing left to do would be dual Broadband feeds and redundant switches, but that seems like overkill for Ham stuff. The problem I see with all this is that these kinds of deal systems will become popular for this type of application and I won't be able to get them cheap anymore. So everyone please ignore this thread! Chuck - N8DNX On 9/6/2010 5:12 AM, Nate Duehr wrote: Think about doing RAID1 and having two disks in it if it's inaccessible for 1/2 of the year. Disclaimer: I did this with W0CDS, which lives on top of a very high mountain -- and it still bit me in the hindquarters. Linux Software RAID1 isn't 100% ready-for-prime-time, sadly, after all of these years. The machine lost a drive, and instead of just chugging along, it started throwing I/O errors for all commands. Luckily, the RAID was working, it just never detected the failed disk. A power off/power on reboot cleared that problem and it came right back online with a single disk and one in a failed state in /proc/mdstat -- so that leads to item #2... Get a way to remotely REBOOT your system... be it a transistor switch on a co-located analog repeater controller, a remote power on/off device like a managed power strip, whatever works that you trust and can access when the box is down. That would have saved someone a trip to the mountain. But he went, we proved the machine would run on one dead drive and one live drive, and then he yanked the dead one to bring it down to get a replacement. Which leads to item #3... Since Linux Software RAID can work with, but really really really likes drives of the exact same CHS layout and size... get a couple of spares. Drive technology is still changing so fast, that by the time you need it, that model will be hard to find. Drives are cheap, keep spares if you're using RAID, or be prepared to backup/rebuild the system from scratch with two new drives when one finally fails. The reason for the drive failure we suspect is two-fold... high altitude (heat, less air between the spinning disk and the flying head, etc) and really bad power up there. Lightning wreaks havok with everything up there every summer, and apparently this drive died too soon into its usual life-span because of all the power hits. Even once we had a UPS inline, the stuff' that comes in on the power lines up there is just utter trash all summer long. It's just a tough environment for PCs. If you're building from scratch and don't mind the eventual performance hit and need to do a secure wipe and reload once in a while, the modern Solid State Drives are a good choice for a difficult site, I think. But their internal fragmentation problems and limits are becoming well-documented, and that secure wipe to get them to go rewrite every bit of the flash and reset the controller that's managing the flash, is important for most brands. Some good reviews of cheap vs. server grade SSDs are starting to show up on the web in droves now, whereas for a few years there, the testing and performance numbers
Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
Gary: Well, it's kind of a Tim The Tool Man Taylor tendency I have. I did, however look at the Icom specs for the gateway system and it says 2.4 GHz and 512 MB, so I'm not even an order of magnitude over that, which would be the Tim thing to do. I also considered fan-less 12V computer boards, but for what I paid for these systems, I couldn't buy a new one of those boards. The nice thing about this system is that it has redundant supplies, BIOS, drive array, fans, and so on so it shouldn't go down with common failures. It also has integrated lights-out management, so I can can talk to it over the network even when it's shut down to restart it, reboot, or diagnose problems remotely. The other nice thing is that they show up regularly on E-Bay at prices less than a cheap PC at Walmart. (It's a DL385 G1.) If nothing else, I could chew up some CPU cycles doing s...@home or some such thing, but the IRLP computer did end up with a bunch of things running on it also, and I suspect this will be the same. I even thought of installing VMWare on it and running both the D-Star gateway and IRLP in separate virtual machines, but I'd have to get more memory in it to do that well. Chuck On 9/2/2010 4:50 PM, Gary wrote: Chuck, Since you have it lying around, and don't mind the power bill, might as well use it! I thought about using a ml350g2 I had, but wanted something that would run on 12v, have no moving parts, and use less power than the radios! We have a couple minor utilities running, the only thing that we had an issue with is the GUI (David indicated it kept trying to mount the GMSK board as a drive). We really haven't used it for anything else, and have no plans to, with the exception of putting a real SSL cert so users no longer have to deal with the warnings. Gary KB2BSL WG2MSK repeater
[DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
All: I've been looking for minimum system requirements for a D-Star Gateway / NI-Star computer system. I probably have a few systems here I might be able to use, but would like to make some kind of intelligent selection. I could probably find the specs for CentOS (Redhat) and base my choice on that, but is NI-Star going to be similar? Any direction is appreciated. Chuck
[DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
NI-STAR / Gateway requirements are less than those for Icom Gateway. I think Dave (G4ULF) is using a fairly modest 512 Mbytes of memory and an ITX style board (typically 1-1.6 Ghz. processor). You do need Ethernet and probably would be good to have 2.0 USB for a node adapter. John D. Hays Amateur Radio Station K7VE PO Box 1223 Edmonds, WA 98020-1223 VOIP/SIP: j...@hays.org
Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
Gary All: It's funny how these things go. No sooner did I put the question on this list than I realized we have a spare HP DL385 with a dual-core AMD 2.2 GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and 2x72 GB 10K SCSI drives sitting here at work doing nothing. Even has dual supplies and the additional fans along with lights-out management. Should be perfect for a site I can't get to 6 months of the year. The AMD processor should do fine in 32-bit i386 compatibility mode. It also has DVD, USB and I believe two slots open for cards. Since I'm a Linux guy, there's no telling what I might want to do with the horsepower once it's installed. Anything that might trip me up here? Are there going to be restrictions on what I can run on the gateway system? Chuck - N8DNX On 9/2/2010 2:38 PM, Gary wrote: Chuck, We run the G4ULF system on a Via C7 mini ITX board, 1GB ram, and a 8GB CF card as the HD. The CPU never gets much usage, and it has no moving parts. Only 1 Ethernet port is required. It runs on CentOS. The system cost less than $150 to build, including case. Gary KB2BSL WG2MSK repeater
Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
On Sep 2, 2010, at 1:50 PM, Gary wrote: We really haven’t used it for anything else, and have no plans to, with the exception of putting a real SSL cert so users no longer have to deal with the warnings. You know that Robin (AA4RC) has purchased a wildcard for dstargateway.net and provides SSL certificates free in the form of CALLSIGN.dstargateway.net (e.g wg2msk.dstargateway.net) for the asking ... tell him the CNAME or A record you need created. If you are using Dynamic DNS because of a non-static IP, just use one of the free Dynamic DNS services and have him create a CNAME record. Turn around is quite fast. John D. Hays Amateur Radio Station K7VE PO Box 1223 Edmonds, WA 98020-1223 VOIP/SIP: j...@hays.org
RE: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
John, WOW! That is interesting, and I did not know. So instead of dstar.wg2msk.sidigital.org via DDNS, I can use his, and get a SSL cert? This does point to the one problem I have with D-Star. Information fragmentation, it's all over the place, one group for this, another for that, etc. What group is for Dplus? Thank You so much! Gary KB2BSL WG2MSK repeater From: dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com [mailto:dstar_digi...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of John Hays Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 5:08 PM To: dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements On Sep 2, 2010, at 1:50 PM, Gary wrote: We really haven't used it for anything else, and have no plans to, with the exception of putting a real SSL cert so users no longer have to deal with the warnings. You know that Robin (AA4RC) has purchased a wildcard for dstargateway.net and provides SSL certificates free in the form of CALLSIGN.dstargateway.net (e.g wg2msk.dstargateway.net) for the asking ... tell him the CNAME or A record you need created. If you are using Dynamic DNS because of a non-static IP, just use one of the free Dynamic DNS services and have him create a CNAME record. Turn around is quite fast. John D. Hays Amateur Radio Station K7VE http://k7ve.org PO Box 1223 Edmonds, WA 98020-1223 VOIP/SIP: j...@hays.org
Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Gateway / NI-Star System Requirements
On Sep 2, 2010, at 2:25 PM, Gary wrote: John, WOW! That is interesting, and I did not know. So instead of dstar.wg2msk.sidigital.org via DDNS, I can use his, and get a SSL cert? Yup, just ask him for a CNAME for WG2MSK pointing to dstar.wg2msk.sidigital.org and a cert. This does point to the one problem I have with D-Star. Information fragmentation, it’s all over the place, one group for this, another for that, etc. What group is for Dplus? Yup --- there isn't a separate DPLUS that I know of, but dstar-gateway on Yahoo! is where a lot of these questions are handled. Thank You so much! Gary KB2BSL WG2MSK repeater John D. Hays Amateur Radio Station K7VE PO Box 1223 Edmonds, WA 98020-1223 VOIP/SIP: j...@hays.org
