So I need to make a list of crap I’d like to do for the year 2009 on this server. Begin the bullets in no particular order:

• Folding@Home
• LDAP
• File Sharing
• Update Wordpress
• Documentation
• Work on Posting more

To note that I don’t like the way the default wordpress does bullets. I guess I will have to use HTML to write up my future posts. In the meantime. I have Folding@Home working. It’s is even set up to start at boot. I will post that information in a later post. The next thing I would like to work on, is setting up some sort of either plugin for wordpress, or statically configure a part of the homepage to show some of the stats that this little server is chugging out. I know it’s a slow server. By no means is it going to kick butt when it comes to processing. But I am still curious about that amount of work that it does do in a certain amount of time.

The next thing I have on the list is LDAP. Being that this is a single server home environment, I can’t see what LDAP will be able to provide for me in the future. However I would still like to play with it some. If I can set up some sort of enterprise network inside of here, rock on. If not, bummer. But I want to play with it more to see what LDAP’s capabilities are, and also to learn more to build up my skills in something.

File Sharing is the next thing listed. Currently this server is setup with AFP sharing. Again I’ll put all that information in another post. My current environment involves one apple that has Time Machine. So I figured I’d play with a file sharing protocol I’ve never really touch based on before and see what happens. Low and behold, I can now backup my mac over the network.

My wordpress version is outdated. Even though the update may only take 5 minutes, I still want to write it on the list so that even I have a document proving that I was supposed to do something by the year 2010 rolls by.

The next two basically explain themselves and tie into each other a tad. I’d like to document more of what I do. Right now I usually just play around. I feel that if I were to type my sandbox like acts, people would laugh at me. But now is the time to post up here what I do and hope that someone will provide me with some legitimate feedback. This will also include posting more to my blog obviously.

So a google search on running Folding@Home as a service turns up a crap ton of results. I’m here to add to that list :-)

You should go ahead and

sudo su -

The first thing to do obviously is to download the latest and greatest from Folding@Home, at the time of this post:

wget http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/FAH6.02-Linux.tgz

Untar

tar xvvf FAH6.02-Linux.tgz

Move the files to where they “need to go”/”out of the way”

cp -R FAH6.02-Linux/* /usr/share/folding

Let’s go to that directory so that we can run the initial configuration, after the questions are done and it begins to start processing workloads just Ctl+C

cd /usr/share/folding

./fah6

After closing stopping the script we will create a startup script. So let’s go home.

cd ~

Create the new script

vim fah6

Copy the following into the file then :wq

#!/bin/bash

cd /usr/share/folding

./fah6 >> folding.log 2>&1 &

Then we add the script to the /etc/init.d

chkconfig -a fah6

Bangin’ You are now done. To verify it works:

/etc/init.d/fah6

Wait a couple seconds for Folding@Home to start then run

top

to see it slam out your CPU.

If you’d like to see it’s progress here and there observe the log file that is created within the /usr/share/folding directory. I would like to see if this can be changed/moved so that I can do some stuff with the log file. Particularly have the ability to be able to show off how far my computer gets with each work unit. That shall be saved for a later date.

My site is back online!

And is in need of some serious updating. My site went offline when I decided once again to move from using my laptop as a server, to putting an old white box back online as the new webserver. The box is really old, at only 733MHz processor, and only 384MB of RAM. However, it’s only purpose is to server as a website for whoever wants to read it, a samba share for the home network, and to process Folding@Home. Currently only the website part works and I’m continuing trying to tweak it a bit. I’ve had a bit of trouble finding the best way to put my website on here. Currently everything that is available to the public sits inside of folders inside of the /var/www directory. I would rather have a user get to my blog using only the FQDN. But right now users still need to add the /wp to the end of the FQDN. I’d like to cut out that slight need for such. Currently, for my sake, apache will allow directory browsing as I always forget that I need to add it there when I type in my website’s address. I don’t use bookmarks. I am modifying the site-available and sites-enabled configuration to find out which works the best and to determine which will not break other virtual sites that are being hosted on this server.

Currently my samba share isn’t work either. The proper ports are open, but authentication fails for some reason.

And I haven’t set up Folding@Home yet either. On a slow processor like this it will take more than 15+ days for one workload, but, might as well waste electricity. This server is plugged in for one reason.

Until my next post/update, have a great weekend.

If you saw my last post I had some odd issue where transfer rates of information between anything and my server were tremendously slow. Something i noticed on the switch in which the computer was plugged into, the link light wouldn’t blink normally. Normally being the random blip that all switches see as the uplink sends something too all connected to that switch. What I did notice, is that the light would seemingly go out for a second, then return. A constant blinking which got me thinking one thing.

After replacing the computer to a different port, all seems to be well. So my assumption is that that port is just going bad on the switch. To test that theory I plugged another machine just to see how bad I’m going to slow down someone elses computer. Turns out, they aren’t having that issue. The link light blinks like any other light, and through the use of transferring data to that PC, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of issue at all. So what’s the deal?

Just to go backwards a bit, I plugged my server back into that port once again. And once again, that issue pops up. Again. So right now, I’ve reversed the ports so that the issue doesn’t show for me. Hopefully eventually that PC that is plugged into port two won’t go down. That would be a serious bummer.

Until my next post, have a fantastic evening.

So I’m having a slight issue with this server. It uses a 100Mbit connection between a switch and a seperate router. The connectivity between two directly connected systems, transferring a file seems to stick below a transfer rate of only 6KB/sec. I honestly don’t think this is an issue with my server though. When the server is located at a different location, transfer rates appear normal. Downloading a file of a couple hundred megabytes only takes minutes rather than hours. But here, I don’t know what is holding it back.

Then again, I also don’t have access to the hardware in which all this stuff is connected too. So maybe I’m screwed. But a solution will soon be in place. The plan will soon to be put a network card in an older computer. And leave that computer at a different location. That computer will serve as the location of the server permanently. The only thing that i need to worry about, is the lack of managment to the server locally. As I will be 5 hours away from it.

So soon. Sometime late December my server will be once again placed on a different physical machine. And at a new location. It will still be, once again, used for hosting this ugly blog and be some way of testing stuff. Remotely. MMMMmmmmm internet.