How To – Page 23 – Roo's View

The New Server

I had previously posted about the server than runs lowtek.ca and that it had been given me trouble. Well, the new parts came pretty quickly and it was a good thing – as just last week the old server packed it in. It turns out that the most likely reason for the instability was the CPU fan, as it totally seized on the failure day and my CPU temperature climbed up past 90C. An $8 fan might have solved my immediate problem, and been a lot less headache — having temperature graphs of the server would have helped spot this, something I plan to do with the new one.

At least I had a good excuse to buy new hardware. So here is a picture of it hanging out in my furnace room next to the water heater. While the new system is based on a MiniITX mainboard, I’ve opted to use a full size ATX tower case to house it (the case was a free hand me down from a friend).

I did modify the case quite heavily. The stock fan grills were simply holes drilled in the case – it was more grill than not, so the airflow was pretty poor. A couple of minutes with the dremel removed the grills entirely. I also opened up the front bezel to provide easy inflow of air for the lower case fan. The upper case fan is mounted to a pair of drive bay covers I’ve glued together.

This case has 6 x 5.25 drive bays, and 3×3.5 bays. My system drive lives down in the bottom and the data drives are up where the top fan is.

I also cut a fan vent in the side panel to blow down onto the mainboard itself. This I did with a jigsaw, and I think it turned out well considering it was my first attempt a something like this.

This older ATX tower case had all of the right connections for this new motherboard. Power, reset and HDD connectors hooked up no problem. The power LED was a 3 pin connector vs. the required 2 pin connector. Karl was able to hook me up with a spare HDD connector that I spliced onto the power LED.

Since there were mounting locations for 2 more exhaust fans, I couldn’t help myself and added two more at the top/back of the case.

If we count fans, I’ve got 5 case fans, 1 more in the power supply, and a chipset fan on the mainboard. Overkill? Yes. Required? No, probably not. There seem to be plenty of folk out there running exactly the same board with very minimal cooling.

My motivation here was the current system failing due to heat death, and I’d like this new system to run problem free for years. The extra cost of a few fans isn’t a big deal, and its very quiet relative to the furnace. I may further duct / optimize the cooling as the measurements thus far don’t show much of a delta from other peoples numbers on the net.

One more picture of the guts, to give you a sense of how small the MiniITX board is:

The transition from the old system to the new one should have been as simple as dropping in the drives and booting. Unfortunately the old version of Ubuntu (Dapper) didn’t have support for the new Atom board and couldn’t make use of its network drivers etc.

Worse still, the system drive refused to boot in the new machine. It is something that still has me scratching my head. I even went to the effort of cloning the boot drive onto another which I had proven would boot with the new system – and still no go. It was almost as if the MBR was in an unexpected location. Last week I lost a bunch of sleep.

Above is a picture of the old server while it was cloning the boot drive (which as I mentioned, turned out to be a waste of time). After five hours of beating my head on the problem, I simply moved the data drives to the new system – and did a clean install on a fresh boot drive. The old server continued to host lowtek.ca on the old system drive using the external fan to keep the CPU cool.

Yesterday I turned off the old server. Here are a few URLs that I found helpful in the migration:

As I host a number of wordpress blogs here migrating them required a database backup / restore. I simply copied over the /var/www directory data instead of re-installing the blog software itself.

Backup:

mysqldump --add-drop-table -h localhost -u sql_username \ --password=sql_passwd sql_database_name > blog.bak.sql

Create DB on new host:

$ mysql -u root -p

mysql> CREATE DATABASE sql_database_name;

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sql_database_name.* TO “sql_username”@”localhost”
-> IDENTIFIED BY “sql_passwd”;

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

mysql> exit

Restore:

mysql -h localhost -u sql_username -p sql_database_name < blog.bak.sql

Well, if you’re still hanging in there – let’s talk about power consumption. I borrowed Trent’s Kill-A-Watt meter and did some measuring. My home desktop machine draws around 150Watts, and up to 200Watts of power when loaded (and using the CD drive). The old server machine used 2W in standby, 120W during boot (loaded) and 112W steady state. The new machine uses 1W in standby, a peak of 100W at boot (when the drives are spinning up), and 60W steady state.

In conclusion: Server machines need to have monitoring setup to track potential problems (temperature). Migration of your data is less painful if you keep an install log with notes and links (thank goodness I did one last time). New hardware usually needs a new software install, don’t fight it.

Deleting Channels From MythTV

MythTV is a DIY digital video recorder. Building a box to do this isn’t much beyond putting together a PC and installing Linux, but its not something I’d expect a non-geek to dive into. Geek or not – everyone should have some form of digital video recorder, it completely changes how you watch TV.

Of course, since my MythBox is using a capture card to grab video from my sattellite receiver it has no idea what channel has which show. When I started with MythTV, there was a free service offered by Zap2It.com that offered up listing information in an easy to consume format. The listings provide MythTV with guide information so it knows what is on, and when. Today there is SchedulesDirect which is well run and inexpensive at $20 USD a year.

Over time, channels change and this is reflected by changes in the listing data. MythTV detects these changes, and will add new channels automatically – it won’t remove channels that we listing information is no longer being delivered for. I’m on an older version (0.20) but suspect there is a design decision here.

Using the UI to remove channels is pretty clunky. The MythTV site has instructions on accomplishing this via the command line, and while I’m comfortable with the command line – it is a multi-step process which I dreaded doing. So over a few months, more and more bogus channels that I didn’t actually have would get added. For example – a new pay per view (PPV) channel would appear, new guide data would become available and I’d start seeing it as an available channel… grr

Of course, you still need to connect to SchedulesDirect and remove the unwanted channels from your subscription otherwise MythTV will just keep adding the ‘new’ channels back. Tonight I wrote up a quick Perl script to automate the multi-step process – this makes removing unwanted channels quick and easy.

Usage: remove_channel.pl <channel number>

#!/usr/bin/perl


use Mysql;
# MYSQL CONFIG VARIABLES

$host = "localhost";

$database = "mythconverg";

$user = "root";

$pw = "";
# PERL MYSQL CONNECT()

$connect = Mysql->connect($host, $database, $user, $pw);
# SELECT DB

$connect->selectdb($database);
# DEFINE some MySQL queries

$findchan = "SELECT chanid FROM channel where channum = ".$ARGV[0];

$delchannel = "DELETE FROM channel where chanid = ";

$delprogram = "DELETE FROM program where chanid = ";
# EXECUTE THE QUERY

$execute = $connect->query($findchan);

while (@results = $execute->fetchrow()) { print "chanid ".$results[0]."\n"; $connect->query($delchannel.$results[0]); $connect->query($delprogram.$results[0]); }

IR4PS3 Review

Until recently, the PS3 was one of the cheaper options for Blu-ray playback and it has high quality playback. Today there are stand alone players which will match the quality of playback, but not the boot / menu speed the PS3. Still, the PS3 goes beyond movies by providing game play and media center duties.

One of the drawbacks to the PS3 is integration with standard universal remote controls, not having an IR control story. The official Sony PS3 remote uses the same bluetooth connectivity as the wireless game controllers. To work around this there are several 3rd party solutions exist such as IR2BT, ps3toothfairy, Schmart and IR4PS3, I chose to go with the latter.

I first found out about the IR4PS3 option via remotecentral.com, a site I’ve often referenced ever since I invested in a Phillips Pronto TSU2000. Having a complex audio/video setup is one thing, but it becomes a much bigger problem if my wife can’t make use of it – a fully programmable remote such as the Pronto makes the whole setup easy to use. After reading the AVSForum thread on IR4PS3, I felt confident that it would be a good match for my setup.

The short version of the review is that ordering it was easy, it was shipped quickly, and works exactly as I would expect. You do need to provide your own power supply, but the manual lists several low cost and easy to find options. As it uses the bluetooth module from the Sony remote, compatibility with the PS3 firmware upgrades should be a non-issue. I now can use my IR based universal remote control with the PS3. Response time feel good, exactly as if the PS3 actually had IR support built in. I would not hesitate to recommend it to others.

Read on for a full review with pictures..

Continue reading “IR4PS3 Review”