Hardware to run FreeDOS

In my earlier post, I stated that I intended to run FreeDOS directly on bare hardware, meaning, without virtualization.

Using the FreeDOS 1.3 Live CD, I tried a different systems at my disposal. Most modern ones failed, one way or the other.

An IBM 380Z laptop booted the CD fine, however, only the center of the screen was used. The system would work, however, the experience would be disappointing since the real estate of the screen is severely underused. The mouse-nipple, or however the red thing in the middle of the keyboard is called, worked find under FreeDOS.

My HP/Compaq nx6110 booted the live CD fine, screen fully used. The touchpad did what it was supposed to do, right away. This could be the perfect candidate for running FreeDOS on bare silicon. However, this laptop is my goto-PC for Debian/LINUX. So, for now. FreeDOS will live in qemu on this one.

Actually, the first hardware I tried FreeDOS on was one of my Acer ASPIRE ONE 110 netbooks. One that I had given an HDD years ago. Here is a link to a post on my RF related blog, concerning the HDD in the Aspire ONE netbook. To the time, I had not thought about an IT related blog, so, it was called "off-topic", seen the radio-frequency electronics content of my other blog.

Here is the netbook during the install of OpenWatcom FORTRAN on FreeDOS.

Acer ASPIRE ONE 110

The install files are on the USB thumb-drive on the right hand side of the netbook.
While the device is equipped with Ethernet, I had not set up or tested networking by the time of writing this post.
The touchpad on the Acer does not work with FreeDOS yet. I tried various options with the USB-mouse-driver, all of the attempts ended in crashes.

As a pure DOS computer, the netbook does a great job.
Several programming languages are available, through the FreeDOS-CD and also by installation using the USB thumb-drive and a USB floppy drive.
My old DOS version of Maple V runs just fine and so does a MathCAD student edition I happen to own.

Unfortunately, the Aspire ONE does is not fully supported in FreeDOS what APM is concerned. However, dictating processor speed does work fine.
I created the following aliases in fdauto.bat

alias slow=fdapm speed1
alias fast=fdapm speed8

Those commands set the processor speed to 1/8 and 8/8 (full) processor speed. In the case of the Aspire ONE, the native processor speed is 1.6GHz. Running the netbook at 1/8th of that, will still deliver a very decent 200MHz. This is plenty of fast for a DOS computer.

In fact, when editing code, I set my netbook to run at lowest speed. Only when I compile and run my programs, I will ramp the CPU up to max.

In conclusion, the Acer ASPIRE ONE 110 is the perfect DOS machine, I never was able to dream about.
In my nest post, I will compare the ASPIRE ONE to machines of that past, which I still own today.

Building a LittleFe Cluster

Since my times at university, I was always fascinated by high power computing, in particular parallel and vector computing. Of course, those machines are so expensive that it is very hard to get hold on a smallest of computing accounts.

The LittleFe project overcame one of the hurdles, namely the price, and came up with a really neat solution. The hardware of said project seems carefully selected, e.g. 12V power supply for the nodes, a GPU with CUDA cores, dual core 64bit processors, passive cooling etc. However, still this hardware has got its price.

Today, second hand hardware with relatively fast CPU are showing up on the market for cheap.
I focused a bit on finding suitable hardware with the possibility to compromise here and there.
It happens that a computer store in my vicinity happens to sell second hand mini-ITX board of this make
Jetway NF92-270-LF
for just €8.- including 1GB of SO-DIMM and a PSU.
This was to good to be true. The price easily beats even the "raspberry pi".

Well, of course I had to compromise:

• no suitable GPU
• single core ATOM N270
• only 1GB
• 32bit instruction set

 On the plus side:

• passively cooled
• 12V power supply
• onboard Gigabit ethernet
• onboard VGA (for configuring the nodes)
• available daughter boards (e.g. Gb LAN)

Actually, the shop had 7 available, I bought all of them...
More data at the mini-itx.com store.

The plan
is to arrange all 7 boards in a compact box running of 1 common 12V power supply. Taken the max. power consumption is 22W, this will add up to 154W for the boards. For a 12V system, this ends up in the range of 13A. I figure a regular PSU like this will do. In the beginning, I will certainly test with the PSUs coming with the boards.

The boards will be hooked up to an 8 port Gb switch, also located in said box. I happen to own a D-Link DGS-108, which is currently not in use. This thing rates 1A @ 5V, adding 5W to the system.

Potentially, depending how this develop, the system will have to be provided with one or two low noise fans, since heat worth about 160W will be created.

The 7 nodes will be the workers in a parallel (as opposed to massively parallel) system. Therefore, the box will not house any HDD.
The head node will be some similar individual computer equipped with GB LAN. Personally I would have enjoyed to use an Intel Atom netbook for this. However, the one I got have fast ethernet (100Mbps) only, which will compromise the cluster performance. Hence, the present choice is my trusty Asus Eee Box B202, which has got a Gb NIC and a WiFi-interface (see LittleFe page for explanation). Also, the B202 operates the same Atom N270 CPU as the Jetway boards, creating a nice symmetrical 8 core 8GB cluster.

Next step
=> pick up the ordered parts (tomorrow), build some sort of support structure for the boards and get started.
As always, I will take pictures and post those, together with progress reports, on this blog.

BTW
earlier this year, I build a 24 core cluster with AMD FX6100 processors, a project I never documented... I promise to do so in the near future.

Adding noise to the server room

 Friday, July 26, 2013

Adding noise to the server room

The last few days have seen me changing my entire IT, not in terms of the system, rather the location. A land line connection needed to be pulled for the phone (skype - land line DECT combi phone), the RED ethernet had to be rewired and finally an ethernet switch was made redundant.

All in all, I am still running the following system:

• smoothwall express with RED and GREEN connections, running a squid caching proxy
• my old WiFi-router as an wireless access point (WPA2 of course)
• the good ole ACER H340 running NAS4Free with a RAIDZ-1 ZFS pool using four 1TB disks, serving as a media server, a file server and a backup server
• an AMD E-350 system running FreeNAS with a RAID-0 scrap data storage with two 2 TB disks
• my good ole Buffalo NAS (1TB)

All storage devices are running NFS, SMB and AFP, expect for the Buffalo, which has nof NFS.
To me it is somewhat clear, the H340 is the main, safe, data storage. However, it happened today, one of the 4 HDDs stopped its service. We had a nice warm summer day, temps at about 27 centigrade. The HDDs in the H340 were running at about 50º centigrade, which is somewhat warm.
I shutdown the server, let it sit to cool for some while and fired it up again. The HHD was back, however, some data was potentially written when the HDD took a break. Luckily, I am running a ZFS pool, hence, the disk could be fixed, in ZFS this is called "clear". Everything is back to fine again.

The incident made me rethinking about the H340. There is a post on the internet somewhere, in which someone discloses a mod which changes the H340's case fan.
That seems to be exactly what I need to do, I figured. Indeed, the H340's regulated case fan sucks air out of the case. The fan is arrange such, that air is forced along the HDDs, before exiting the case. Well, that makes some sense :-s Drawing a regulated low amount of hot air along some disk drives...
In my scrap box, there still was this unregulated fan which came with the Antec water cooling used in my workstation. This thing is a real blower, however quite noisy, hence, I did not use it in my workstation PC. However, now that all my servers are in a dedicated noisy room, why not using it in the H340.
This noisy Antec fan is now doing service to blow cool air into the case, over the HHDs, with the following impact, on that same hot summer day (eve):

Temperatures before mod:

• CPU: 45º C (essentially independent of the ambient temp)
• HDDs: 47º - 50º C (during idle)

Temperature after mod:

• CPU:  24º C (essentially the ambient temp)
• HDDs: 29º - 36º C (during a ZFS pool scrub)

And here is the downside of it. A very quiet device device is now turned into a very noise but well cooled NAS.
Mind you, the H340 is a perfect machine for running NAS4Free! (see earlier post)

Turn Your Old WiFi-Router Into a Wireless-AP

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Turn Your Old WiFi-Router Into a Wireless-AP

You may have noticed that I am busy renovating my IT. Some days ago, I posted a short text about the use of smoothwall as a caching web-proxy. Now it seems time to also hand over the routing to smoothwall. At the time of writing the last post, I simply hooked up my WiFi-router to the smoothwall box, telling it to get WAN from it (by DHCP). The rest of the routing was done by this trusty but old router. Downside of this router, it is equipped with 100Mbps only, while the rest of my wired network is 1Gbps.

Went shopping today, and grabbed a simple 5 port Gigabit switch, which is now connected to the smoothwall box.

How to get WiFi? I still could use the old router and tell it to get WAN from said switch. To tidy up address space, it would however be nice to have an Wireless access point in place of a WiFi-router.
A quick search in the internet revealed this page:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-basics/30338-how-to-convert-a-wireless-router-into-an-access-point
Very cool stuff! Works like a charm!

The next step would be to loose the cheap Gigabit switch again and integrate everything in the "production environment".

improve your web experience

Saturday, July 6, 2013

improve your web experience

Howdy!
Yet another off-topic post. Lately I am not doing a lot of radio. However, I think that the occasional experience with IT can be at least as much fun as good ole ham radio.
One of the last experiments was virtualization using proxmox on an AMD E-350 low power dual core processor. This particular system is now equipped with an additional ethernet card (100Mbps) and serves as a firewall w/ caching web-proxy using Smoothwall Express 3.1 RC1. The hardware I use is a total overkill: 8GB RAM and 250GB HDD space. As I said, it was used for experiments with virtualization.
The surfing experience has improved a lot since static features of webpages are now locally stored in the caching proxy.
Using smoothwall with squid is highly recommended!
Cheers!