Gentoo on an old PC

berry120 · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 9:50 am Post subject: Gentoo on an old PC

Couple of queries here - I'm thinking of resurrecting a 12 year old computer as a file server using Gentoo and Samba - might install CUPS and make it into a print server as well if there's enough processing power left over. The idea is to sit it in a cupboard when installed and do administration remotely via SSH, so when in use no keyboard / mouse / monitor will be required. I'd obviously do the install manually and not via the livecd, since it hasn't got the requirements for the latter.

The first question is what filesystem would be best? I've heard good things about XFS and was planning to go with this, but then learnt that JFS used far less CPU time to do it's job, making me wonder if JFS would be better on such a slow processor. Or would another filesystem be more suitable, which sort of ties in with the next question...

Secondly, is there a "safe" filesystem to choose whereby the machine can just be turned off at the mains without corrupting the data? I know that XFS would probably be the worst to choose from for this since it agressively caches stuff in RAM, and ext2 would need a ridiculously long time to recover itself. If it was a more up to date computer with Wake-on-LAN and ATX (it can't turn itself off automatically, back in the days when it ran windows 95 you still had the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen before you turned it off manually.)

Thirdly, are there any precautions I need to take when choosing a network card for it? It hasn't got one in there at the moment so I'll need to get one obviously, but it hasn't always played ball with newer PCI cards - a PCI version of a GeForce FX I tried to install a while back caused the machine to refuse to post, so I've been cautious of what will work since.

Thanks for reading, any suggestions would be appreciated

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

well, jfs has quite good featues, but these are mostly theoretical. i run it on my / partition on my main workstation since july 2005.
my experience is not the best, especially concerning power outage. jfs has big problems with that. i believe there is no fast filesystem that can really handle that.
on my other machines i have xfs which i like much more. but of course that's personal taste.

nic:
which speed? on 100MBit/s i recommend a 3com 3c905. on 1000MBit/s something with a intel chip. but you may want to read this.

berry120 · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 11:42 am Post subject:

In terms of speed, I'm thinking along the 100MBit/s line, I don't really want to shell out more than I have to, I've only got a 100MBit/s router and even if I could get a decent transfer speed with gigabit, I doubt the little processor would be able to keep up! I was wondering about a PC LINE NW100B, purely because it costs £4 and I can pick it up from 10 minutes away.

Regarding file systems, are there any slower ones that handle being turned off suddenly well? Or are these rare and too ridiculously slow to be usable?

Thanks

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

sorry, i don't know which filesystem would be best to use if you want to be safe of power outage.
never heard of something like pc line nw... are you sure this is good hardware? 4£ does not sound so.
and, does it have driver support in linux?

berry120 · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 2:21 pm Post subject:

I don't know if you're in the UK or US, but it's a relatively well known brand in the UK that does a fairly decent range of cheap stuff - it's rrp is £8 but on web order I can pick it up half price. I've got keyboards, soundcards and modems from them before and they've all been fairly cheap and while not the best quality, they've worked and stayed working! As for linux driver support I'm not sure, and that's the big if... I'll have a look around a bit more i think before giving it a try, though if not I can always use it elsewhere.

Thanks

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

i live in salzburg, austria. do you have a link to the website of "pc line"? i did not find one.
maybe there is some specs sheet or something that tells us about the used chip.

berry120 · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 7:09 pm Post subject:

Wow, I love Austria, is great

I went shopping and decided to be safe and shell out for a slightly more expensive Belkin card, but it works great. Now just the installation process! In terms of power outage, I think I'll stick with XFS and and make sure people are careful about how they turn it off - perhaps it's possible to unmount all the partitions remotely? Will have to look into this later, thanks for your help

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

you can gracefully shut it down remotely. just with ssh.

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

PC Line is a budget brand (We're talking sub-Belkin. I believe the australian term is yum-cha), typically sold in places like PC World.

It's probably a re-branded card, but as always with Linux the card model doesn't matter - It's the network chip it uses that counts!

As for the filesystem choice... the shutting down is not a file-system issue - It is an operating system one.
Like all operating systems more complex than DOS, Linux holds a lot of files open while its running; ESPESCIALLY if it's running the X Window System, but even if it isn't things like the logs will be open.

Frankly, you can use any filesystem that journals itself properly - The whole point of the journal is to help bring the filesystem to a 'consistent state' after an unexpected shutdown.

The trick will be to minimise open files if you really want to go down the power-cutting route, but as another poster states you'd be (farfarfar) better off shutting the thing down remotely (e.g. using SSH) BEFORE cutting power.

One last thing - The cupboard it is in: Make sure it is WELL ventilated!

berry120 · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 10:46 pm Post subject:

Lol thanks, now you mention ventilation I think I'll put it by the side of the cupboard...

I've come across a rather different / interesting / annoying problem now, the fact gentoo doesn't like my hard drive at all.

It's a 40GB IDE drive which I've slotted in place of the 1GB one. Gentoo boots from the livecd fine, but fdisk just says "unable to read /dev/hdb" and badblocks just runs through reporting everything on the drive as bad.

So I assumed this was a dead drive, and tested it on another computer - smartutils reported no problems at all. I tried another drive just to be sure, and same problem.

I then fired up a distribution called basiclinux (fits on a couple of floppies) and it detected and formatted the drive fine using ext2. Back into the livecd, and all the partitions are listed in /dev, but none of them mount and fdisk won't run. I've tried swapping the IDE channel of the drive, jumper settings, IDE cables, and I've run memtest, but nothing has pointed out any faults.

I would think it was a motherboard / CPU issue after all this, but basiclinux seems to work with both drives fine! Anyone got a clue what's going on? I sure haven't