Well, between the dental drama, a few other money-type commitments, and the sometimes-iffy availability of the hardware itself, I think I’ll wait on the Kurobox. Still looking for something smaller/quieter/more energy efficient, though.

Today, while digging through shelves at the office I stumbled across an unused “bronze keyboard” Powerbook that appears to be in good condition. The wheels got turning, and I got to thinking about converting it to a home server. To do so, I will need to purchase a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card and either an external enclosure for the existing PATA drive, an external enclosure + new SATA or PATA hard drive, or a new external HDD.

Big advantages of this approach (relative to the Kurobox) are a lower necessary startup cost, a bit of flexibility (to change something, just open the lid and type), built-in power protection (batteries), and a surfeit of packages for the PPC platform.

Drawbacks relative to the Kurobox are the fact that the laptop batteries won’t protect the external drive from power loss, and the fact that the laptop on its own has a maximum power consumption of 45W compared to the Kurobox’s 17W. (Much of the laptop’s theoretical max would be devoted to using the CD-ROM, using the internal hard drive, and powering the LCD backlight; I intend to pull the CD-ROM after installation, and I plan on using the other two as little as possible. Doesn’t affect power usage on the external HD, though.) But while the Kurobox beats the laptop on those two fronts, the laptop is still a far cry better than the current system. Additionally, if I really want to take a Kuroboxy approach later on, I can do that and just put the laptop/external drive assembly someplace else as my offsite backup (duplicity, w00t).

of course, first i need to see if i can even have that laptop.

+++

Crunching with BOINC on a couple systems: my home laptop, Fred’s Mac mini, the home server, and my office workstation. Fred’s is the most recent addition to the mini-cluster, and so far I don’t think he’s noticed any difference in performance.

Also have MacFUSE and sshfs going on his computer. Essentially, now we both have secure wireless access to the home server — from home or elsewhere — and I can probably turn off netatalk and save a port and a few cycles.

+++

I have a post brewing about energy efficiency. Light bulbs are the easiest way to describe the economic benefits of efficiency, but I want to expand beyond how CFLs will save you money on your light bill. Since I’m not 100% certain how I’m going to achieve this, I’m going to set it on the back burner.

I mentioned that the Kurobox would get its own post, so here goes. It’s shaping up to be kinda long-winded, and I apologize for that.

Currently, I have a fileserver (named “pangloss” in a fit of pure optimism) based on Gentoo built from old whitebox components. It’s about a 1GHz i686 processor (don’t remember exactly, it’s been a long long time since i’ve dealt with CPU internals), a 40GB parallel ATA HD housing the root partition and swap space, and a 400GB PATA HD housing /var and /usr but mostly /home.

Pangloss hosts backups for both my laptop and Fred’s desktop, as well as some common files. It listens for SSH from the outside world as well, so that we can access it from work or the road, and runs a couple services for the local network like DHCP, DNS caching, and an NFS-available portage tree.

Pangloss is also a full-sized tower that has a gajillion fans and consumes a bunch of electricity. I have yet to approach full CPU load or memory capacity without the help of the BOINC client. The last time I rebuilt it, I had it at my then-office, and whenever it was on my co-workers jokingly called it the “jet engine”. The last time the house electricity went out, pangloss drained the UPS to its last little LED within 20 minutes, but once I shut it off the UPS lasted another 20 minutes or so. These are non-optimal.

So, in the interests of size, noise, power consumption, and that geeky itch to adjust things incessantly, I’m itching to re-do the local file server in a much smaller, quieter, more efficient, and more challenging way.

Enter the Kurobox. The Kurobox is, essentially, a Linux-based Buffalo NAS appliance without the built-in hard drive. There are two models currently on the market, the HG/WR with a PowerPC chip and a PATA interface, and the Pro with an ARM9 chip and SATA. Each one can hold precisely one 3.5″ hard drive, but there’s no real limit on the capacity of that one drive.

(Before I continue: I know there is a purist out there grumbling about how I could just build my own network file server that’s more powerful and can do RAID and can make julienne fries or whatever. Great, but I’ve already taken that approach [cf. earlier in this very post] and would now like to adjust priorities away from sheer computing power.)

So here’s the list of advantages for the two Kurobox models as they apply to my situation. They’re equivalent on RAM and network speeds, and both hold only one drive but that’s OK as I’ll be finding a duplicity buddy for backups.

HG/WR
• Cheaper for hardware if purchased from the US distributor
• Already have the drive!
• I’m already familiar with the PPC architecture
• More software packages are ready to compile on/for PPC processors than ARM processors
• The PPC architecture is generally more powerful
• All sleek and pretty

Pro
• SATA has smaller cables, which means better airflow, which means less heat
• SATA is faster than PATA
• SATA doesn’t use the PCI bus, so the drive won’t compete for resources with network activity or USB
• SATA is more future-proof than PATA
• The ARM architecture is generally more power-efficient than PPC
• This particular ARM chip is faster than the PPC in the HG/WR (400MHz vs 266 MHz)
• More ports for future expansion
• I can leave the existing data where it is while setting up partitions et al. on the Kurobox Pro. This is a very big thing.
• For now, the US distributor has the Kurobox Pro in stock in Texas for $169; shipping starts at $9. At the moment, the HG/WR is only available online from a shop overseas, with both product and shipping costs based on the Euro and converted to USD and therefore lots more than what they’d be if it were also in stock in Texas.

So the balance favors the Pro, for now. Anything else I should consider?

OK. Here goes.

This coming weekend is the Gateway Men’s Chorus holiday show, which we’re doing with an interim director who’s rather good but who is probably feeling a bit overwhelmed by some of the poor habits that were tolerated by prior directors. (for example, I don’t know half the material and the show opens in 50 hours. Awesome.) Thanks to a schedule conflict this’ll be our last show for a while, and though we both enjoy singing we’re both ready for the hiatus.

This coming week is also finals in my two classes. I don’t anticipate any trouble with either one, though the programming final is going to cut into the department holiday party (which is shaping up to be rather epic). At least the physio final is done online.

Work? Rocks. Today, for example, I got to play with the degausser; disassemble a “legacy” box attached to an important piece of lab equipment; use a badass air compressor to remove the dust from said legacy box; discuss a large project with the school netadmin; and wrangle Mailman and Postfix for a departmental mailing list server. And through all of this, no stupid user questions!

Had a retirement party for the department’s glass washer last week. It was odd to have a very large table full of finger foods, even well into the party, and to have a cooler of beer and soda just sitting out for anybody. (BTW, when you use as many glass Petri dishes and glass flasks and glass beakers and glass test tubes as these labs do, you really do need to have at least a half-time position just to keep it all sparkling clean.)

Buying a car for Fred. (He already knows; in fact, he picked it out.) Once the papers get signed and the financing stuff worked out (hopefully tomorrow) we’ll be trading in his Ford for a sleek used BMW that is similar in vintage and mileage but that is in much, much, much better shape. An eventual project: a car PC to go in that cavernous trunk.

Another project, but much more urgent: replace the home file server with something smaller and quieter and more efficient. The GHz-or-so box we have now does the job, but it’s big and noisy and overpowered for what we use it for, though it is contributing nicely to my BOINC stats. I’m eyeing a Kurobox to replace. (This discussion will get its own post, as it’s too in-depth to cover here.)

Stuck in my head right now is Rufus Wainwright’s “Going to a Town“, which rather succinctly encapsulates my current feelings towards a certain political movement.

While I have the chance, I need to plug Portable Firefox. I’ve been using it on my USB flash drive for almost two months now, and I don’t know how I can use campus computer lab boxen anymore without it. The idea with PFF (and, by extension, other portable apps) is that, once you install it on your USB flash drive (or iPod etc.), you can then use it on any Windows PC with all your preferences and bookmarks and saved passwords and such intact. It’s a good solution for those of us who have to use public or semipublic computers or who aren’t always at the same PC (and let’s face it, a flash drive is a hell of a lot cheaper than a laptop). And yes, there are similar packages for Mac users too.

Just passed a young male undergrad, around 18 or 19, with a Fu Manchu, and it did not work on his boyish face with his short hair. Though I realize that college is a time for experimentation and everything, there are some freshman experiments that need to be halted quickly, and bad scruff is at the top of the list. It’s tempting sometimes to roam the campus with a razor in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, shouting “YOU! SHAVE! NOW!” at inappropriately fuzzy boys.

Gotta go. Discussing reproduction in physiology.