doomclaw.de

A few weeks ago I changed my hoster and so I had to ex- and import all databases. Unfortunately I’ve missed, that some tables weren’t imported correctly. So I had to re-import everything. Sadly I only got a backup from before the server relocation. So everything on this site is rolled back to 2010-03-23.
I’m sorry if there were any comments, that weren’t processed due to this.

OK, there was long time no update, because I was busy with some other projects and all the things around christmas and winter holidays. So here is the update. I bought the Super Micro mainboard mentioned below, and an 80GB WD 2.5″ HDD, as well as 2GB DDR2 PC2-3200 from a local vendor. So I got a running system for some tests.
I tried out some things with FreeBSD and with ArchLinux, but I quickly met my limits due to the missing RAID-HDD’s. Unfortunately I got no money fot these at the moment and in addititon it seems like all hard disc vendors received some bad production runs of 1.5TB hard discs both from Seagate and WD in the last month. Other manufacturers are out of question for me.
So my first decision was to put the whole project on hold but then it happened that I was able to borrow 3 WD RE2 750GB HDD’s for some first RAID-tests. Now I’m able to test the whole system and make a plan how to install it when I buy my own HDD’s. Additional I will be able to backup the whole data on my desktop, at least for a few days, and reinstall everything on it. Especially I will be able to upgrade my Windows XP installation to Windows 7, since I’m using this without any problems as secondary OS on my laptop since months and decided to rollout this to my desktop.

After hours of research I’ve decided to build an Intel Atom-based homeserver. Since most of the desktop mainboards use Nvidia’s ION or Intel’s 945 chipset the only criterias were the features and upgrade abilities.
Finally I decided to buy a Super Micro X7SLA-H.
Pros:

• Really reliable server hardware
• Dual Core (Intel Atom 330)
• Energy efficient (TDP of the integrated CPU: 8W)
• 2x PCI-e x8 (electrically: 8x and 4x)
• Dual Gigabit NIC
• IPMI
• Serial port
• Completely FreeBSD 7.2 compatible

Cons:

• Realtek NIC
• No ECC-RAM support

I decided to dismiss the plans for ECC-RAM in favor for a more energy efficient CPU and the Realtek NICs could be disabled by adding an Intel Server NIC later, due to the PCI and PCIe slots.

This is the mainboard I finally ordered. I’ve got a call from the computer shop today, that it’s allready arrived. Unfortunately I got no time to get to the shop this week, so I will get it next week I think.

Missing parts for a working system: RAM and System-HDD

I have reconsidered my Mainboard choice. I will use an ASUS M3A76-CM. The reason is simple. This Mainboard is nearly the same as my choice before, but the network interface controller is already supported by FreeBSD.

Pros:

• Energy efficient chipset
• ECC-RAM support
• Serial port for an optional serial console
• 6 SATA ports (good for upgrades)
• Already FreeBSD compatible NIC

Price: circa 45€

By the way, I had already ordered the case and the case fans. These parts arrived last week.

The following hardware should meet my needs:

CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 235e
Pros:

• Energy efficient (TDP: 45W)
• Low priced
• Decent performance for later upgrades

Cons:

• Not yet available in Europe

Price: circa 60€

Mainboard: Asus M4A78L-M LE

Pros:

• Energy efficient chipset
• ECC-RAM support
• Serial port for an optional serial console
• 6 SATA ports (good for upgrades)

Cons:

• FreeBSD 8.0 compatibility for the NIC unknown at this time

Price: circa 50€

RAM: 2x 1024MB Kingston Value, PC2-6400, 800MHz, CL5, ECC (KVR800D2E5/1G) (PDF)
Pros:

• ECC RAM

Price: circa 29€ each

System HDD: Western Digital Scorpio Blue, 2.5″, 80GB, 8MB Cache, 5400rpm
Pros:

• Energy efficient (more efficient than 3.5″ drives)

Price: circa 44€

RAID HDD’s: 3x Western Digital Caviar Green, 3.5″, 1.5TB, 32MB Cache, SATA 3 Gb/s
Pros:

• Energy efficient
• Much lower priced than any 24/7 HDD (i.e Western Digital RE)

Cons:

Price: circa 84€ each

Case: Chieftec Mesh-Series LCX01-B-B-SL
Pros:

• Reliable server case
• Looks good besides my existing Chieftec Mesh-Series LCX01-SL-SL-B

Price: circa 70€

Case fans: 1x Noctua NF-P12 and 1x Noctua NF-B9
Pros:

• Silent

Price: circa 16€ respectively 18€

PSU: be quiet! E5-450W
Pros:

• Already at hand
• Somewhat silent
• Somewhat energy efficient (efficiency 80+)

I’m planning to build a new home server for backups and some essential services like my PXE server.

I will need the following services:

• File services: Samba (SMB or CIFS) and maybe NFS
• Install services: PXE
• Web services: AMP (Apache/HTTP, MySQL, PHP)

Optional:

• Core network services: DNS, DHCP, NTP
• Network access services: RADIUS, VPN

As for every server the hardware should be somewhat reliable. To save energy I will pay specific attention on the energy consumtion of each part and due to the fact that this server will be located in my living room it should also be somewhat quiet. All data stored on the server should be safe, so I will be bound to a RAID system. But hardware RAID controllers are very expensive so they are out of my budget. Another option to create a hardware RAID would be using the mainboard’s onboard RAID controller. But this option is unreliable. If the mainboard fails I will need to buy another mainbaord with the same chipset, and if the mainboard will fail in 5 years it would be hard to get another one with this chipset. Furthermore the onboard RAID controllers are using the CPU and RAM to control the RAID, this is not better than a software RAID. So I decided to build a software RAID based on ZFS with FreeBSD 8.0.

So here is a little aggregation of my specifications:

• Somewhat reliable hardware
• Energy efficient hardware
• Silent hardware
• More than one hard disk, 2 for RAID1 or better 3 or more for RAID5
• FreeBSD 8.0 compatible hardware

Yesterday we tried to install OpenSolaris 2009.06 on a x86-based server at work. The first attempts ended in a sudden reboot without any error messages. But then the installation worked but the system kept rebooting the installed system. We didn’t expected any hardware errors since the server is brand-new. Nevertheless we ran some tests but memtest showed the same habit to reboot the whole system. After some observation we found out that the reboots occured exactly after 4 minutes of testing.
We’ve searched the internet for solutions but the problem not known. So we searched through the handbook of the Super Micro X7SBE motherboard and my instructor found something that was worth a try. There was a jumper mentioned which controls the behavior of the built-in watchdog timer. The jumper was set to reboot the whole system if an application hangs. So we set it to just send an interrupt to the application and behold memtest just stopped after 4 minutes with a message about an unexpected interrupt. The third setting was for disabling the watchdog timer completely. This is the setting we chose finally and now the system runs fine.

I managed to recover the accidently deleted data. Due to the fact, that I recognized my mistake while the deletion process I unmounted the partition directly afterwards and made an image of it with dd.
After some searching on the internet I’ve found ext3grep. With one simple command everything was restored, since I knew the date of deletion.

ext3grep $IMAGE --restore-all --after=1250740800

This command restored all recoverable files from $IMAGE (which represents the path of my dd-Image) after Thu, 20 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT (referenced by the UNIX timestamp 1250740800).
Since I had unmounted the partition ther were no write actions after the deletion, so each deleted file was recoverable.

I got 2 Directories within my /home. One is named Backup (a mount-loop from my backup partition) which is really essential and the other one is named Backups (just a simple old webserver backup directory). So I wanted to delete the old Backups-dir and did a quick rm -r ~/Bac TAB ENTER which resulted in…, yes you’re right, rm -r ~/Backup…
Wondering why it’s taking so long to delete the 240MB in the Backups-dir I recognized what I did. Interruption of the rm-command rescued about 200GB of the files, just half of the whole partition.

Lesson learned: In Future I’ll keep my data somewhat more sorted and I’ll never ever again name 2 directories within the same parent dir that way.

What?

This is a guide on how to install Windows 7 using a syslinux-based PXE server.

Why?

Since I got a ThinkPad X61 Tablet and no X6 Tablet Ultrabase or any other external DVD drive I have to install every operating system on this laptop with USB flash drives or, and this is the prettier way, over my home network. To accomplish this I’ve set up a PXE server for all the Linuxes I use. But I still had to use CD’s and DVD’s for installing Windows.

There are some ways to install Windows XP through PXE but the problem with these solutions is that you will need a Windows Server machine for this. You could also use a Linux machine with a PXE server running and boot into a memdisk with the installation disc image loaded. But the PXE booted memdisk will only take up to 500MB of data and every (not modified) XP image is larger than this.

With the release of Windows Vista Microsoft released a new version of their Preinstallation Environment which is said to work better on Linux PXE servers. There are some howtos about this on the net but I never tried this.

Now with the upcoming release of Windows 7 there will be another new version of Windows PE. This guide will show how to accomplish the task of using Windows PE 3.0 with a syslinux-based PXE environment.

What will you need?

• A working PXE boot server with syslinux (there are plenty of howtos, just google them). If you plan to use a Linux server as I did, I would recommend to use tftpd-hpa because it supports path remappings. Without these remappings the TFTP server won’t find the correct paths in your filesystem, because some paths are hardcoded.
• An image of your Windows 7 Installation disc (I’ve just used the images I downloaded from MSDN)
• The Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows 7 (Download)
• A working Windows-based computer (I have used an installation of Windows XP in VirtualBox)

How?

1. Run the Windows AIK Setup on your Windows computer.
2. Start the Deployment tools command prompt.
3. Run the following shell script. It will prepare your Windows bootloader for usage with PXE. There are some variables set in the lines 5-17. You can change them to your favor.

   @echo off
   cls
   
   REM Variables
   echo Setting variables ...
   REM the path to your WAIK installation
   set WAIKPath=%ProgramFiles%\Windows AIK
   echo Set WAIK directory to %WAIKPath%.
   REM possible values are: x86, amd64 and ia64
   set ARCH=x86
   echo Set architecture to %ARCH%.
   set PEPath=C:\winpe_%ARCH%
   echo Set temporary working directory for Windows PE to %PEPath%.
   set TFTPPath=C:\tftp\Boot
   echo Set TFTP boot directory to %TFTPPath%.
   REM Don't change this one!
   set BCDStore=%TFTPPath%\BCD
   echo Set BCD store to %BCDStore%.
   echo All variables set!
   echo.
   
   REM Environment check
   echo Checking for clean environment...
   if not exist "%WAIKPATH%" set NoWAIK=1 && goto :end
   if not exist "%WAIKPath%\Tools\PETools\%ARCH%" set NoARCH=1 && goto :end
   if exist %PEPath% echo Temporary working directory not empty! Need to remove && rd %PEPath% /S
   if exist %PEPath% echo Temporary working directory still not empty! Trying again ... && cd "%WAIKPath%\Tools\%ARCH%" && imagex /unmount %PEPath%\mount && rd %PEPath% /S /Q
   if exist %PEPath% set NotClean=1 && goto :end
   if exist %TFTPPath% echo TFTP boot directory not empty! Need to remove && rd %TFTPPath% /S
   if exist %TFTPPath% set NotClean=1 && goto :end
   if exist %BCDStore% echo BCD store existing! Need to remove && del /P %BCDStore%
   if exist %BCDStore% set NotClean=1 && goto :end
   echo.
   
   REM WORK!
   echo Starting real work now ...
   cd "%WAIKPath%\Tools\PETools"
   echo Copying PE-Files ...
   call copype %ARCH% %PEPath%
   echo Mounting Windows PE image ...
   imagex /mountrw %PEPath%\winpe.wim 1 %PEPath%\mount
   md %TFTPPath% > NUL
   copy %PEPath%\mount\Windows\Boot\PXE\*.* %TFTPPath% > NUL
   copy "%WAIKPath%\Tools\PETools\%ARCH%\boot\boot.sdi" %TFTPPath% > NUL
   copy %PEPath%\winpe.wim %TFTPPath% > NUL
   cd %PEPath%\mount\Windows\System32
   bcdedit -createstore %BCDStore%
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -create {ramdiskoptions} /d "Ramdisk options"
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set {ramdiskoptions} ramdisksdidevice  Boot
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set {ramdiskoptions} ramdisksdipath  \Boot\boot.sdi
   for /f "Tokens=3" %%i in ('bcdedit /store %BCDStore% /create /d "Windows 7 Install Image" /application osloader') do set GUID=%%i
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set %GUID% systemroot \Windows
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set %GUID% detecthal Yes
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set %GUID% winpe Yes
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set %GUID% osdevice ramdisk=[boot]\Boot\boot.wim,{ramdiskoptions}
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set %GUID% device ramdisk=[boot]\Boot\boot.wim,{ramdiskoptions}
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -create {bootmgr} /d "Windows 7 Boot Manager"
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set {bootmgr} timeout 30
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore% -set {bootmgr} displayorder %GUID%
   bcdedit -store %BCDStore%
   pause
   goto :exit
   
   :end
   if %NoWAIK%=1 echo "Your WAIK directory was not found. Execution aborted." && pause && goto :exit
   if %NoARCH%=1 echo "Your Architecture doesn't seem to be right. Or at least it is not known by your WAIK installation. Execution aborted." && pause && goto :exit
   if %NotClean%=1 echo "Your environment was not clean. Execution aborted." && pause && goto :exit
   
   :exit

4. If nothing went wrong you should have some files in the directory which is set in the TFTPPath variable. Copy these files into a subdirectory of your TFTP servers boot directory. In my case this is /var/lib/tftpboot.
   If you’re not using tftpd-hpa you should place all files into a subdirectory called “Boot”. This is very essential.
   If you’re using tftpd-hpa you can place it in any subdirectory you want to, because you can remap the paths. I chose /var/lib/tftpboot/windows/7.For the remapping we need to do some extra steps:
   1. Create a remapping file called /var/lib/tftpdboot/tftpd.remap with the following content (change paths to your needs):

      re ^pxeboot\.n12 windows/7/pxeboot.n12
      re ^pxeboot\.com windows/7/pxeboot.com
      re ^pxeboot\.0 windows/7/pxeboot.n12
      re ^bootmgr\.exe windows/7/bootmgr.exe
      r ^\\Boot\\ windows/7/
      r ^\\boot\\ windows/7/
      r ^Boot/ windows/7/
      r ^/Boot/ windows/7/
      r ^boot/ windows/7/
      r ^/boot/ windows/7/
      r ^\\ windows/7/
      rg \\ /

   2. Edit your tftpd-hpa configuration in /etc/default/tftpd-hpa to parse the remappings:

      #Defaults for tftpd-hpa
      RUN_DAEMON="yes"
      OPTIONS="-l -m /var/lib/tftpboot/tftpd.remap -s /var/lib/tftpboot -vvv"

      The -vvv part is optional, but highy recommended to get the most verbose output in /var/log/syslog.

5. Now you’ll need to create some symbolic links in your Windows boot directory.

   ln -s pxeboot.n12 startrom.0
   ln -s winpe.wim boot.wim

6. To map the Image in your pxelinux menu just edit your pxelinux config and add the following lines:

   LABEL win7
           MENU LABEL Windows 7
           KERNEL Boot/startrom.0

7. Because the boot image is just a Windows PE image with a minimal shell you’ll need to make your installation source accessible over your network. For this I’ve just created a guest-readable samba share on the same server where my PXE server resides.
   You’ll need to copy the content of the sources directory on your installation media into this share.
8. The configuration is done. Let’s try to install Windows 7. Start your target computer, boot into your PXE menu and choose the Windows 7 menu point. When the system is completely booted you should get the mentioned Windows shell. To connect to your installation share and start the stup just type the following commands (where the text in squared brackets should be replaced with the appropriate data):

   net use y: \\[IP of your share server]\[name of your share]
   y:
   setup.exe

That’s all the installation of windows 7 should start now.

Additional notes:

• It is not possible to run a x86 Windows PE and start an amd64 installation from this. If you plan to install an amd64 System but only got an x86 system to do the configuration (or vice versa) you might run into errors. In this case just configure the installation source for the architecture you’re currently using. At the end you can just copy the winpe.wim you would like to use from %ProgramFiles%\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\%ARCH% into your source and overwrite the old one.
  You can also place both files in your source directory and just change the symlink to the right file. This is the way I did it. The last option is to create a second entry in the PE boot loader with bcdedit. But this caused my boot loader to have two entries, both named “Ramdisk options” but pointing to different images (x86 and amd64). This could be confusing if you don’t remember which entry entry is for x86 or amd64.
• If you plan to use a Windows based PXE server for the installation I recommend tftpd32. I have not tried this way but the most how-to’s for installing Windows Vista by PXE recommend this one. You need to set pxeboot.com as boot file, you can skip the steps 5 and 6 and you’ll have to rename the winpe.wim to boot.wim.
• Maybe it’s possible to load the Installation image of Windows 7 directly. It’s located in the sources directory of your installation media and is named install.wim. But you’ll definitely need much RAM for this, because both images, x86 and amd64, are over 2GB in size. I was not able to try this because my laptop only got 2GB RAM, so the boot loader blocked loading of an image of this size. But I’m not sure if the error message derived from my amount of RAM or if there was another error while using this image.
• This guide should work for Windows Vista as well or at least the steps should be very similar.

Thanks to…

• Joshua Flanagan for his excelent guides [1] [2] to accomplish this with Windows Vista and tftpd32.
• Gernot Stöckl for some ideas I derived from his Wiki.

Any comments, additions and corrections are greatly appreciated.