The goal was rather simple, take my infinitely useful FreeBSD box and scale it down to more practical metrics. Less space, less energy, no noise. The tool for the job: 10 years of technological progress.

Well, I’m not sure if that was the goal or the excuse, sometimes one simply gets an itch. An urge to integrate new hardware and drag old and reliable but bulky and power hungry hardware to the curb.

Maybe I’m being too specific in the details to label this as a recurring rite… but a good intro is a good intro, I’m sticking with it.

Requirements

I had enough specifics in mind that I’m still a little surprised I was able to satisfy every quirky demand. I wanted an Atom based system for the ideal balance of performance and efficiency. I wanted the system to be as ridiculously compact as 2012 technology would allow.

My first thought was the Asus Eee Box. Their size and cost would have been ideal, but contradicting my small form factor requirement was the desire to migrate my existing mirrored 3.5″ tera-byte drives.

Replacing my storage wouldn’t have been a deal breaker, but as I use the FreeBSD box as my gateway, dual high quality NICs was a must.

What started as a few innocent, curiosity driven Google queries quickly escalated into incurable gadget lust when I stumbled on a Mini-ITX board that looked perfect for the task at hand…

Wait, what’s this? A Mini-ITX case that can hold six (six!) 3.5″ drives and an SSD?!

…and it still maintains a sleek minimalistic design?

…also… silent?

These are some of my favourite attributes… I can’t stop now!

The toys for the job

• Super Micro X7SPA-H-D525
• A pair of 2 GB Kingston KVR800D3S8S6/2G modules
• Fractal Design Array R2 Mini ITX NAS Case
• An Intel 311 Series 20 GB SSD, SSDSA2VP020G201, for the OS – just because.

Results

Two weeks impatiently awaiting the arrival of my backordered board from NCIX (everything else was in stock), some quick assembly, hours of migration work and endless compiling later…

Inferno is now replaced, upgraded to FreeBSD 9.0 and back to his regular duties (including hosting this very site). Everything is running stable and I couldn’t be happier with the difference in power consumption!

The Athlon Thunderbird 850 MHz system this replaced loaded my UPS to 17% of its capacity. This system… Only 2%! Run time estimates on battery backup have gone from just over an hour to over four hours! This kind of difference in power consumption alone probably justifies the exercise. If nothing else, I can now just play the “going green” card.

Even a lowly Atom runs circles around the ancient ol’ T-Bird. All else being equal, how can you go wrong with more clock speed, an extra core and Hyper-threading?

To summarize: everything went according to my diabolical plan. Let’s see if I can run on this for the next decade.

As a new year approaches, I find myself glancing at this site in realization… Gee, it’s now a matter of months until I can say I haven’t posted here in two years!

That’s quite alright… Unless I have something substantial to justify one of my long winded posts, its just so much easier to spew at 140 character intervals! I’m now a fully formed twitter addict.

No need for alarm though, you can still come here to ease your insatiable need for all things ‘Denis!’

Thanks to the magic of ThinkUp and some custom tweaking, all of my carefully crafted fits of narcissism are available in near real-time by following the “Tweets” link above.

I think this fits well with the “lazy sysadmin” mentality I’ve developed over the years… A quick tweet is all that’s required to distribute a tasty soundbite or hunk of verbal diarrhea to this site, Facebook and a plethora of mobile devices. What’s not to like?

Like every other Maxtor I’ve deployed in the last several years, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) 120 GB drive in this server was throwing multiple read errors and threatening to fail at any moment.

As opposed to waiting for its imminent death, I decided it was time to do some upgrades.

Not wanting to invest in a PATA drive in 2008, I added a Promise SATA300 TX2 SATA PCI controller card and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB (ST3750330AS)

No hardware upgrade is ever complete without the complementing software upgrade. During the procedure I also opted to upgrade the system from FreeBSD 6.2 to the nearly production ready FreeBSD 7.0 RC2.

In spite of the long hours of work required to completely setup a new FreeBSD installation, everything went smooth. FreeBSD plays nice with the new controller card and everything is now up and running and back to normal. The old 120 GB drive was getting a little cramped anyway, the extra breathing room is going to be nice!

After over five years of running Incoherency.Net, it’s time for an overhaul. I’ve now migrated the site over to it’s new home (www.denis.lemire.name) and migrated any significant content over to WordPress.

I may keep incoherency.net as the domain for my home network, or phase it out entirely, I have not decided on all the details yet. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any major updates to the backend of this site, and overall it needed a fresh new look.

So far so good. The installation was very smooth. I was able to write my own mod_rewrite rules and keep the WordPress files in their own directory, while still having it appear at the root URL of this site. This allows me to also have non-WordPress managed content.

My previous and aging attempt at a site was suffering from stale content due to me not having the time to jump through the hoops of updating it. The previous site was powered by my own slapped together code which is very heavily showing its age. In spite of its MySQL based content storage, it is actual a royal pain to post to (requires manual editing of MySQL tables). I’ve contemplated rewriting it, but who’s got the time?

Slightly before the whole “down with Telus” fiasco I upgraded the server to PHP5 which broke the web mail interface. After some additional upgrades web mail is now functioning. Time to catch a movie!