Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 07:39:52PM +0100, Conrad Kostecki wrote: Am 06.11.2012 11:56, schrieb Chris Wilson: snip I would definitely prefer SSD drives in a net6501, especially if you're installing two. The box gets *hot* even with just one spinning disk. I can't confirm this. I've installed a 7.200rpm drive (WD Black) and its only getting warm. The disk itself reports about 39 degree.. This is absolutely ok.. With two disk, the temperature was about 44 degree, which is still fine. I can confirm both! I purchased two net6501 boxes several months apart. The heatsink size changed, I believe because Intel published revised dimensions. I figure Soekris doesn't want to comment on it because people can be irrational about such things. Yes, my first net6501 gets much hotter than my second. Or rather, the heatsink gets much hotter. But I've never had any problem with it. FWIW, the first was a net6501-50 in a standard case, and the second a net6501-70 in a rackmount case. As much as I like the Soekris boxes, it sounds like you really want a desktop case and MoBo with a laptop CPU and some 3.5 drives. And if you do want to go down that route, these servers are reasonably fast, expandable and absurdly cheap: http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421 Soekris are a tad expensive. I just put together 2 x 1U E3-1230v2 Ivy Bridge boxes, with SLC SSD and 8GB memory. At peak load they still draw only 80W, remarkably. And each cost about the same as my net6501 rackmount. But you don't buy the Soekris because it's cheap, you buy it because of the form factor, and because you expect it to be the last thing to die in the cage. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
ED Fochler schrieb: I've had no luck with VM, but I didn't try very hard. I'd recommend against it. Hard drive power and heat is a serious concern, with 2 of them and no air movement, you will likely burn up the drives. Even with a fan, I'd recommend 5400 rpm or equivalent green drives. Hard drive power consumption is not a very easy statistic to find, but it does vary, and the big disks you want will be pretty hot and thirsty. Hello, I set up my new net6501-70 this days (under construction). # smartctl -a /dev/sda | egrep 'Model|Temperature' Device Model: KingSpec KSM-mSATA.5-016SJ 194 Temperature_Celsius [...] 40 (Min/Max 30/60) # smartctl -a /dev/sdb | egrep 'Model|Temperature' Device Model: SAMSUNG HN-M101MBB 194 Temperature_Celsius [...] 38 (Min/Max 19/45) # smartctl -a /dev/sdc | egrep 'Model|Temperature' Device Model: SAMSUNG HN-M101MBB 194 Temperature_Celsius [...] 38 (Min/Max 19/47) SSD 'sda' is connected to J5 mSATA socket. HD 'sdb' and 'sdc' are 2.5'' in a really cool Jou Jye ST-1225 SATA-Backplane JP18 powered, connected via ADAPTEC 1220SA (sata_sil24 driver) in J3 PCIe. # lspci | grep 'RAID' 0d:00.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. Device 0242 (rev 01) The room temperature is around 21°C without airflow. The case is a 19'' Kerberos.si dual 6501 (one board only). # dmesg | egrep 'CPU0|CPU1' [0.015032] CPU0: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM1) [0.030635] CPU0: Genuine Intel(R) CPU@ 1.60GHz stepping 01 # sensors coretemp-isa- Adapter: ISA adapter Core 0: +82.0 C (crit = +100.0 C) -- Regards *WOL* fgang *S* chricker ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Hello, On 06/11/12 19:51, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote: All I can suggest is don't put the soekris in a pile of equipment. The entire case seems to act as a heatsink. Not a proper heatsink of course, but it stays a bit warm. Putting anything on top, or putting it on top of something else that gets warm (or both) is asking for trouble I think. I've basically set out all of my core network devices on a smallish table, spread out so nothing heats the others up. I will add a little comment to this point, from a few experiments we did here since our last mail of Oct. 18th. 1/ do not put net6501 directly one above another, especially if fitted with regulard disks. Heating will be a real problem. 2/ we did cut some small cardboard pieces to increase inter-boxes space. With something around 1.5 cm of free space between the boxes, the heating gets back to usual (around 40 Celsiuses). Our .2 cents, -- Mbdr ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Hi all, On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, ED Fochler wrote: The additional heat from the PSU components feeding the drives would concern me too. I'd add external power to that DVD drive rather than feeding it off the Soekris. And I would recommend getting one of the real SSD msata drives and putting a real OS install on there. Then you can get the hard drives to spin down because they won't be in use for regular OS stuff, just big data movement. I would definitely prefer SSD drives in a net6501, especially if you're installing two. The box gets *hot* even with just one spinning disk. As much as I like the Soekris boxes, it sounds like you really want a desktop case and MoBo with a laptop CPU and some 3.5 drives. And if you do want to go down that route, these servers are reasonably fast, expandable and absurdly cheap: http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421 Cheers, Chris. -- Aptivate | http://www.aptivate.org | Phone: +44 1223 967 838 Future Business, Cam City FC, Milton Rd, Cambridge, CB4 1UY, UK Aptivate is a not-for-profit company registered in England and Wales with company number 04980791. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Hi! Am 06.11.2012 11:56, schrieb Chris Wilson: Hi all, On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, ED Fochler wrote: The additional heat from the PSU components feeding the drives would concern me too. I'd add external power to that DVD drive rather than feeding it off the Soekris. And I would recommend getting one of the real SSD msata drives and putting a real OS install on there. Then you can get the hard drives to spin down because they won't be in use for regular OS stuff, just big data movement. I would definitely prefer SSD drives in a net6501, especially if you're installing two. The box gets *hot* even with just one spinning disk. I can't confirm this. I've installed a 7.200rpm drive (WD Black) and its only getting warm. The disk itself reports about 39 degree.. This is absolutely ok.. With two disk, the temperature was about 44 degree, which is still fine. As much as I like the Soekris boxes, it sounds like you really want a desktop case and MoBo with a laptop CPU and some 3.5 drives. And if you do want to go down that route, these servers are reasonably fast, expandable and absurdly cheap: http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421 Cheers, Chris. Cheers, Conrad. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Hi, Thanks for sharing your experiences and concerns. --- On Wed, 10/31/12, ED Fochler deadsh...@liquidbinary.com wrote: I've had no luck with VM, but I didn't try very hard. I'd recommend against it. After other suggestions on this list for Linux Containers i've played with that last weekend and it seems to do the trick for me, so i guess full virtualisation is gone from my wish-list :-) Since containers don't add any significant overhead, i guess that's no problem. --- On Tue, 11/6/12, Chris Wilson chris-soek...@aptivate.org wrote: On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, ED Fochler wrote: The additional heat from the PSU components feeding the drives would concern me too. I'd add external power to that DVD drive rather than feeding it off the Soekris. And I would recommend getting one of the real SSD msata drives and putting a real OS install on there. Then you can get the hard drives to spin down because they won't be in use for regular OS stuff, just big data movement. I would definitely prefer SSD drives in a net6501, especially if you're installing two. The box gets *hot* even with just one spinning disk. Would 2 drives + SSD fit in the soekris box ? I thought there was just place for 2 drives. I just checked prices for 256 GB SSD's and they've gone down significantly, so maybe even 2 of those would be an option. Also, just to literally think out of the box: Would a similar setup in a larger casing be better ? I haven't really found one that can hold a soekris, but the idea might be worth a try. As much as I like the Soekris boxes, it sounds like you really want a desktop case and MoBo with a laptop CPU and some 3.5 drives. And if you do want to go down that route, these servers are reasonably fast, expandable and absurdly cheap: http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421 Thanks for the suggestion, but this seems exactly like what i want to avoid :-) What i'm searching for is a low power consupmtion box that can handle 2 drives for redundancy and an optical drive for backups and is fanless. For most tasks i don't need a lot of processing power so it shouldn't be that hard ... i thought :-) However, most mini-itx boxes already struggle with such a setup because most are designed for a single hardrive and the components usually aren't chosen to be linux-frendly. That's where the net6501 and a dual 2.5 hardrive mount kit came in :-) Best regards, Wesley ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
--- On Tue, 11/6/12, Conrad Kostecki conik...@gmx.de wrote: I can't confirm this. I've installed a 7.200rpm drive (WD Black) and its only getting warm. The disk itself reports about 39 degree.. This is absolutely ok.. With two disk, the temperature was about 44 degree, which is still fine. Just to be sure, do you mean these drives: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=790 (You'll have to click the specifications, i can't get that page to open directly). Best regards, Wesley ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Hi! Am 06.11.2012 19:46, schrieb Wesley PA4WDH: --- On Tue, 11/6/12, Conrad Kostecki conik...@gmx.de wrote: I can't confirm this. I've installed a 7.200rpm drive (WD Black) and its only getting warm. The disk itself reports about 39 degree.. This is absolutely ok.. With two disk, the temperature was about 44 degree, which is still fine. Just to be sure, do you mean these drives: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=790 (You'll have to click the specifications, i can't get that page to open directly). Yes, you are right! Best regards, Wesley ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech Cheers, Conrad ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
I've had no luck with VM, but I didn't try very hard. I'd recommend against it. Hard drive power and heat is a serious concern, with 2 of them and no air movement, you will likely burn up the drives. Even with a fan, I'd recommend 5400 rpm or equivalent green drives. Hard drive power consumption is not a very easy statistic to find, but it does vary, and the big disks you want will be pretty hot and thirsty. The additional heat from the PSU components feeding the drives would concern me too. I'd add external power to that DVD drive rather than feeding it off the Soekris. And I would recommend getting one of the real SSD msata drives and putting a real OS install on there. Then you can get the hard drives to spin down because they won't be in use for regular OS stuff, just big data movement. As much as I like the Soekris boxes, it sounds like you really want a desktop case and MoBo with a laptop CPU and some 3.5 drives. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 4:55 PM, Wesley PA4WDH pa4...@yahoo.com wrote: I found that the CPU actually supports virtualisation, but is that really usable ? Most likely not. Also keep in mind, that it is not sufficient that CPU has the VT-x feature; the system board BIOS also needs to support virtualisation. I don't need super-speed (else i guess soekris boxes are the wrong ones to start with in the first place), but i'd like to run all email stuff in a VM and have a VM to do some tests on (for example) LAMP websites. Again, i don't really need super performance but it has to be workable. For virtualisation - I would suggest you consider other options like a mini ITX or micro ATX boards with 4GB or more RAM. They can be housed in special small form factor cases. -- Arun Khan ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Hello, On 15/10/12 13:25, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: I'm new to this mailing list, but i'm not new to the soekris hardware. I have a net5501 which acts as a DSL router over here and i like it very much. In my ideal world i would also like to have a soekris box as a home server, the net5501 doesn't seem to fit the bill but the net6501 seems interesting. This is quite close to what we're setting up. We bought several 6501, one to replace a 5501 (not really because of the 5501, but we ran into too many flash card problems) and several others to use as dedicated servers. OS (Gentoo) is on a 4Gb SSD. The often-written parts of the filesystem (mail server, logs, databases, etc.) are on an internal SATA disk. With 5400 rpm disk (one disk only per box, no RAID), the system does not heat a lot. Our setup is not done yet, we need to move a lot of services from regular server to net6501s - but currently the Soekrises are up to the challenge. Wrt heat dissipation, we do _not_ advise to put one net6501 atop another one with an inside disk. Both will get really hot quickly (less than 12 hours), not to the point of failure (maybe we did not wait long enough) but undoubtedly to the point of discomfort if you touch the enclosures. Anyone knows the minimal vertical spacing between two net6501 boxes to allow for appropriate heat evacuation ? Sincerely, -- Mbdr ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Out of curiosity, I tried running CentOS 6 and KVM on a 6501. I'm not sure the hardware assisted virtualization cannot work, but it doesn't work on out of the box. virt-install reports: ERRORHost does not support virtualization type 'hvm' That failure could be the result of a minor issue, such as the lack of DMI. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Am 19.10.2012 00:16, schrieb Gordon Messmer: Out of curiosity, I tried running CentOS 6 and KVM on a 6501. I'm not sure the hardware assisted virtualization cannot work, but it doesn't work on out of the box. virt-install reports: ERRORHost does not support virtualization type 'hvm' That failure could be the result of a minor issue, such as the lack of DMI. Maybe, its not enabled by the comBIOS? ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech Cheers, Conrad ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Wesley PA4WDH wrote: [...] I found that the CPU actually supports virtualisation, but is that really usable ? I don't need super-speed (else i guess soekris boxes are the wrong ones to start with in the first place), but i'd like to run all email stuff in a VM and have a VM to do some tests on (for example) LAMP websites. Again, i don't really need super performance but it has to be workable. [...] See http://osdir.com/ml/xen-users/2009-07/msg00702.html -- Regards *WOL* fgang *S* chricker ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On 2012-10-15 23:02, Warner Losh wrote: On Oct 15, 2012, at 3:03 PM, Philippe Vanhaesendonck wrote: On Mon, 15 Oct 2012 22:02:43 +0300, Lars Noodén lars.noo...@gmail.com wrote: On 10/15/12 9:44 PM, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: ... The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It seems a bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be email with an MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam filtering. The number of emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day or so, so i guess that won't be a problem. My main question would be if it's responsive enough to be usable. Does anyone have any experience with virtualisation on an atom ? You'll burn lots of scarce resources just running the virtualization itself. The overhead is not small. Since these services are designed to run together smoothly on the same machine, you might consider taking the performance boost and running them all without virtualization. I would consider Linux Containers (LXC). It is not 'full virtualization', but it is lightweight and would give enough separation for what you are looking for... I've had excellent luck with FreeBSD jails in such setups. The overhead is 1% +1 Same here FreeBSD with 10-20 jails effectively isolating services works fine even on net5501 and the smaller (outdated) net4501 unit. /Uffe ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 1:12 AM, Uffe Jakobsen u...@uffe.org wrote: On 2012-10-15 23:02, Warner Losh wrote: I've had excellent luck with FreeBSD jails in such setups. The overhead is 1% +1 Same here FreeBSD with 10-20 jails effectively isolating services works fine even on net5501 and the smaller (outdated) net4501 unit. I've been favorably impressed with jails also in my minor utilization of them, but then I was already most comfortable with FreeBSD generally. My first experience with them was several years ago and in the context of wishing to have good revision control of a number of NanoBSD variants (for Soekris work.) In fact it did not quite work, or not as nicely as I wished for this purpose, but I do not remember exactly why. It was something like not having full control of the MD system or something which the unmodified NanoBSD build process uses. I still made use of jails to maintain different port/package collections and kernel versions going back to the primary to bundle things as I recall (though I lost interest in the project before needing to maintain a lot of flash-based host on an ongoing basis.) I expect to use jails next time I set up a multi-function host with any security considerations no matter what the capabilities of the hardware since they are reasonably intuitive and generally seem to work well. Thanks, - Tom ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
Hi Gordon, --- On Mon, 10/15/12, Gordon Messmer yiny...@eburg.com wrote: If it's just for /boot, I wouldn't expect much of a difference. It sounded like you wanted to install the OS on a flash drive. Ok, i'm sorry, that's not what i meant. Still, booting from RAID 1 isn't generally a problem. Start the first partition (/boot) at 1 megabyte for best alignment and install grub on both drives. I won't suggest that booting from flash is wrong, but there really aren't any advantages. In my (i agree a bit outdated) knowlegde of the subject i thought booting frmo a sw-raid'ed drive was a bit tricky, so that why i came up with the flash idea because it's unlikely to fail anytime soon if i only have to update the kernel every few months or so. @All: Thanks for all the suggestions and links on the virtualisation subject. Since i really want to stick with Linux i guess the Linux Containers seems to be the best tool for the job. I've read some more about them and it indeed seems to provide the level of separation and features i need, the lower overhead is a big plus on relatively low power devices like the 6501. I'll play a bit with it on hardware i already have to see what's what. My main concern is that i want to assign physical interfaces or vlan interfaces to a container and that seems to be possible. As far as i understood i can even share /usr between the containers and that sure is a big advantage with a distro like Gentoo :-) Best regards, Wesley ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On 10/16/2012 11:20 AM, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: In my (i agree a bit outdated) knowlegde of the subject i thought booting frmo a sw-raid'ed drive was a bit tricky, so that why i came up with the flash idea because it's unlikely to fail anytime soon if i only have to update the kernel every few months or so. It hasn't been supported with RAID levels other than RAID1 in older versions of GRUB. RAID1 has always been supported when using 0.90 metadata, which is Anaconda's default. I haven't tested RAID10 or RAID5 on GRUB 2, but I've heard that they're supported. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On 10/15/2012 04:25 AM, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: This is the setup i have in mind: - net6501-70 running Linux - 2x 2.5 insert high capacity SATA disks, using Linux software raid/LVM - Internal USB flash to boot from - External USB DVD writer for local backups If you're putting in hard drives, don't boot from flash. Your system is going to operate more slowly, and there's no benefit. I'm especially worried about the disks, do you have any suggestions for brands/models ? Should i use different brands/models for the individual disks ? Ideally i'd like to run this fanless, is that possible ? http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html I encourage everyone to read that paper in its entirety. Section 3.2 does suggest that drives from different manufacturers will fail at different times. If you are concerned about temperature, you should probably use 5400 RPM drives. I found that the CPU actually supports virtualisation, but is that really usable ? That's an interesting question. I hadn't previously noticed that Intel documents such support. Assuming that the hardware supports all of the required features, the answer will still depend on what distribution you plan to use, and how much work you are willing to put in. While Linux KMV supports 32 bit virtualization, Red Hat derived systems don't build software for it in their 32 bit distribution. I don't know about any other distribution specifically, but you'd have to build the KVM stack for yourself on any Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora installation. Without hardware support you can still probably do Xen PVM, but again, on a Red Hat derived system, you'd have to build the stack for yourself since they no longer support it in new releases. If you use RHEL 5, you'd be able to host PVMs. Support for RHEL 5 is planned until early 2017. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On 10/15/12 9:44 PM, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: ... The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It seems a bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be email with an MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam filtering. The number of emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day or so, so i guess that won't be a problem. My main question would be if it's responsive enough to be usable. Does anyone have any experience with virtualisation on an atom ? You'll burn lots of scarce resources just running the virtualization itself. The overhead is not small. Since these services are designed to run together smoothly on the same machine, you might consider taking the performance boost and running them all without virtualization. Regards, /Lars ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:44:30AM -0700, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It seems a bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be email with an MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam filtering. The number of emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day or so, so i guess that won't be a problem. My main question would be if it's responsive enough to be usable. Does anyone have any experience with virtualisation on an atom ? Excluding virtualization, it should be more than enough. I'm preparing a small mail and web server for hosting which will take on much more traffic than that. The only bottleneck I ran into was mutt loading my 200MB+ mbox files, but compared to an opteron it's only a few seconds longer. (It's actually mutt's pokey parsing; using my own custom mbox and MIME parser, I can load and parse the file as fast as the disk can send it--less than 2s.) FWIW, I'm using 2 20GB Intel SLC SSDs, one for /home and the other for /var. Throwing virtualization into the mix, though, gives me pause. Even with hardware vx instructions, virtual hosts still have a huge stack of software to go through for simple things like disk I/O, and these paths execute a lot. Like with mutt, there's not much overhead with the Atom to make up for suboptimal code paths. If you're worried about security, I'd use OpenBSD or Ubuntu (the former because unmaintained and unpatched it's still a hard target to break, and the latter because Debian Apt takes most of the burden out of maintenance.) My guess is that it will be fine, but be prepared to ditch the virtual hosts idea, and maybe think about SSDs. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
William Ahern will...@25thandclement.com writes: On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:44:30AM -0700, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It seems a bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be email with an MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam filtering. The number of emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day or so, so i guess that won't be a problem. My main question would be if it's responsive enough to be usable. Does anyone have any experience with virtualisation on an atom ? Excluding virtualization, it should be more than enough. I'm preparing a small mail and web server for hosting which will take on much more traffic than that. The only bottleneck I ran into was mutt loading my 200MB+ mbox files, but compared to an opteron it's only a few seconds longer. (It's actually mutt's pokey parsing; using my own custom mbox and MIME parser, I can load and parse the file as fast as the disk can send it--less than 2s.) FWIW, I'm using 2 20GB Intel SLC SSDs, one for /home and the other for /var. Throwing virtualization into the mix, though, gives me pause. Even with hardware vx instructions, virtual hosts still have a huge stack of software to go through for simple things like disk I/O, and these paths execute a lot. Like with mutt, there's not much overhead with the Atom to make up for suboptimal code paths. If you're worried about security, I'd use OpenBSD or Ubuntu (the former because unmaintained and unpatched it's still a hard target to break, and the latter because Debian Apt takes most of the burden out of maintenance.) With xen and a pv guest, the virtualization overhead is low. I have measured about a 10% loss (not on a soekris) from raw disk in dom0 to file in dom0, and also from file in dom0 to raw 'disk' in domU. So basically I concluded that disk IO suffers about 10% (with no activity in dom0 or other domUs). I have not tried xen on a 6501. pgpxZwYz5K9zi.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On 10/15/2012 11:44 AM, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: --- On Mon, 10/15/12, Gordon Messmer yiny...@eburg.com wrote: If you're putting in hard drives, don't boot from flash. Your system is going to operate more slowly, and there's no benefit. I don't really understand this, but maybe i sould explain my idea a bit further. My plan was to put /boot and grub (or whatever loader is feasable for USB) on flash to make it independant of the software raid setup. Can you explain how this would slow things down ? I don't really care for the boot speed, so if that's the only issue it's no problem for me. If it's just for /boot, I wouldn't expect much of a difference. It sounded like you wanted to install the OS on a flash drive. Still, booting from RAID 1 isn't generally a problem. Start the first partition (/boot) at 1 megabyte for best alignment and install grub on both drives. I won't suggest that booting from flash is wrong, but there really aren't any advantages. The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It seems a bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be email with an MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam filtering. The number of emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day or so, so i guess that won't be a problem. My main question would be if it's responsive enough to be usable. The answer depends a lot on what you use for virtualization. It doesn't sound like anyone who's answered has done virt on a Soekris. Support in the CPU isn't enough by itself. I'd be somewhat surprised if you could do hardware virt on a 6501. If you use Xen and paravirt, ignoring hardware virt, the guest would probably be responsive enough. Bear in mind that you'll want to minimize overhead in any way that you can. The biggest overhead in most virtualization setups is disk storage. If you use an LVM to provide backing for your guest, you'll see a huge performance benefit relative to using file backed storage. ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On Mon, 15 Oct 2012 22:02:43 +0300, Lars Noodén lars.noo...@gmail.com wrote: On 10/15/12 9:44 PM, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: ... The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It seems a bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be email with an MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam filtering. The number of emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day or so, so i guess that won't be a problem. My main question would be if it's responsive enough to be usable. Does anyone have any experience with virtualisation on an atom ? You'll burn lots of scarce resources just running the virtualization itself. The overhead is not small. Since these services are designed to run together smoothly on the same machine, you might consider taking the performance boost and running them all without virtualization. I would consider Linux Containers (LXC). It is not 'full virtualization', but it is lightweight and would give enough separation for what you are looking for... -- Philippe ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
Re: [Soekris] Using a net6501 as a home server
On Oct 15, 2012, at 3:03 PM, Philippe Vanhaesendonck wrote: On Mon, 15 Oct 2012 22:02:43 +0300, Lars Noodén lars.noo...@gmail.com wrote: On 10/15/12 9:44 PM, Wesley PA4WDH wrote: ... The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It seems a bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be email with an MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam filtering. The number of emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day or so, so i guess that won't be a problem. My main question would be if it's responsive enough to be usable. Does anyone have any experience with virtualisation on an atom ? You'll burn lots of scarce resources just running the virtualization itself. The overhead is not small. Since these services are designed to run together smoothly on the same machine, you might consider taking the performance boost and running them all without virtualization. I would consider Linux Containers (LXC). It is not 'full virtualization', but it is lightweight and would give enough separation for what you are looking for... I've had excellent luck with FreeBSD jails in such setups. The overhead is 1% Warner ___ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
