The day Bubba choked….

Hi gang. This will likely be the last post from this server. Have a lot to share when this comes back. Suddenly a new project starts, not one but three projects move forward, Bubba shows his or her upper limit, an instant server and more.

The impact here is that over the course of this weekend I am going to set up and move jbcobb.net over to a real headless box running Etch.

But first let me tell you about poor little Bubba and the perfect techno-storm of bugs…

When I turned 17 I lived in Michigan which had a drinking age of 18. Having worked in bars most of my formative years I felt right at home in them. The week I turned 18 I joined the Army (”be all you can be” which is a very positive spin on “is this all you are?”) and between when I left for boot camp and when I returned six weeks later Michigan had raised the drinking age to 20…so in and after boot camp I could belly up to the bar anytime I wanted (a can of *real* Coors was 35 cents) but at home I could only drink at the homes of my friends (or worse, my parents friends). I went back to the Army and took another two years of training thinking I have this drinking age thing beat….only to come home at 20 to find it now 21.

The story of our getting broadband with a static IP so we could do our own hosting was similar. It has always been something we wanted so we could host a large file for a friend or change our website in a moments notice or whatever.  Every single major ISP has sworn they could get us DSL and every time they gave up even though all of our neighbors had it fine.  Consequently you can imagine the joy at finding a real ISP that could deliver a static IP for a reasonable amount….and then I got a job in another part of the state! Beth and I have moved around a lot but always to progressively larger cities and I think at least for now that is helping us because now we have choice for the first time.  However when I first moved into the condo and got the AT&T package, we *had* to do our own mail hosting, thats it. Knowing it will be running 24/7 I went for something that could run reliably, be easy to administer and sipped at the power.

Enter Bubba:

Bubba is a sweet little web, mail, ftp, bit torrent, file and print sharing device from a company called Excito. I was starting a new job in a new city in a new home and had 1,001 things to get up and running so for around 350 bones or so I picked up an 80-gig model. Bubba runs Debian Linux:

bubba 2.6.16.16 #1 Tue May 16 21:45:07 CEST 2006 armv4tl GNU/Linux

Comes with Apache, BIND, mail, everything is all set to go. I plugged him in, logged into the web interface and had a website up in minutes. Mail took another day but it was all pretty simple; sometimes too simple. I occasionally found myself looking for more options. Anyhow, I logged in, installed MySQL, Wordpress and JBCobb.net in its current form was born. I have had maybe two or three readers over the past year so and Bubba has done us well. Then came dark Wednesday when, looking for a way to mail the editor of Linux Today I accidentally contributed a link to a story I had posted about making a computer for a kid with Linux on it. Beth calls me at work the next day asking what is up with the mail server and I am thinking I read it fine when I got up at six a.m. so something must be wrong with her network connection but on a goof I ssh into Bubba and do a top and the 1, 5 and 15 minute interval averages were in the 11-17 range…and most of the top consumers were apache….a BFO hits and I go to Linux Today and I’ll be damned if my page wasn’t there. I will say this; Bubba never crashed and once the spikes were past it worked fine but it also really pointed out that we needed a bigger server. So this weekend I am building an Etch-based server with vastly more horsepower than poor little Bubba. Hopefully there will be no downtime but if there is, it won’t be long.

So the special kids distro of Linux is starting to come together. A solid feature-set is forming and beyond that is some scripting and test sessions with real kids..

Another new project is an upgrade to the VOD system. Up until now we used MVix with a largely unused hard drive in it. All we use the HD for is a place to mount NFS shares from our LAN. Unfortunately this drive developed heat-based problems and was good for a single viewing of any given show. After that any attempt to switch shares resulted in a lockup and ~ 30 minute cool-down period. We had to rescue the files from it since I could not log in via telnet; well I *could* but by the time telnet service was available, the drive was gone.

So we plugged it into a bareback external USB chassis, powered it up with Beth standing by with compressed air as a coolant and I ran a script I hacked out to mirror the drive to a local iso image:

grabbadboy.sh:

#!/bin/bash
sudo mount $1 ./badboy
sudo rsync -av ./badboy/ ./badgirl/
sudo umount ./badboy

./badboy and ./badgirl are local folders; the idea is mount the faulty one in badboy and mirror it to badgirl.

Realistically I had about 45 seconds to get the drive and the script (plus capturing output of fdisk -l and ls -R to capture file system and permissions on the layout. Jacked in another old drive, GPartEd formatted the drive and rsync completed the task. MVix fixed. I was sharing this rescue with a friend at work who suggested I get one of these: An IDE to Compact Flash adapter. This weekend I will take that image, dump it on a card and replace the HD in the MVix with this. If it works, this will be a nice upgrade, easy to replace and require much less power (and gen less heat) than a traditional hard drive.

Another new yet fun project came up: Taking a Linksys NSLU2, reburn it with Debian with a USB drive in one port and an external 100 gig drive in the other to make a sweet low-power torrent station.

Also on the coding front expect updates to solid releases of DVDDB, EZRip, documentation, a twisted method of self-optimizing threads.

But first I have to get this thing hosted on something a little bigger than Bubba…

Me to you.

Jeff

JeffC@JBCobb.net