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1001

Living Room / Re: Home server upgrade meanderings

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2012, 12:18 PM »

I've been pondering a bit, and I don't think I'm going to go the NAS route - they've got some nice little cabinets and lower power consumption, but are too expensive for what they do... and tend to do too much that I feel comfortable running one in a default configuration, but probably not do enough that I could entirely avoid having a server. So, it's build-my-own after all.

I'm currently considering the following parts:
Intel Core i5-3450S
ASUS P8Z77-M motherboard
Corsair 8GB DDR3 1333Mhz (2x4GB) XMS3
RaidSonic Icy Box IB-554SSK
Corsair Obsidian Series 550D
Corsair TX550M PSU

(Any idea whether the 5.25" bays on the Obsidian case are compatible with the IB-554SSK? I've seen some cases that had 5.25" bays that were nice for optical drives, but made it impossible to install multi-slot thingies).

...but I have no idea what kind of power consumption I'd end up with. Pretty certain it's going to be less than my current build, but still - ho humm. And I'm not sure whether the *S CPU is actually means significantly lower power consumption, neither in idle nor under load. And I'm considering whether I should go for 3550 instead of 3450, since that would get me VT-d support (not sure if I'm going to virtualize, and not sure how much VT-d matters, but if the machine is going to last some 5+ years, well...)

I've also wondered if it's worth looking into AMDs offerings. They haven't been able to catch up with Intel since core2 was released, and I've lost a lot of respect for them with all the performance lies from their PR division, but if they have decently performing chips that consume considerably less power than Intel's offerings, I'd be willing to consider it.

1002

Living Room / Re: Home server upgrade meanderings

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2012, 12:42 PM »

Ah yes, one thing I forgot: I also kinda considered getting a NAS, something like the DS413 would probably server a lot of my needs - but still not everything, and while one can probably install a generic linux and stuff, but I wonder if the CPU in the machine would be fast enough... ~35W while working is nice, but if that ends up ~35W (which is probably without harddrives?) for storage and whatever extra for a server, that's obviously not so cool.

Also, the DS413 itself is ~$657, for ~$482 I can grab an i5-3450s, 8gig corsair, some asus mobo, and a 350W BeQuiet PSU... that leaves *some* room for grabbing a decent case, perhaps other cpu/mobo, and hotswap bays :-)

1003

Living Room / Home server upgrade meanderings

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2012, 12:34 PM »

So, my current server is getting a bit long in the tooth - it has served me since December 2007, with a few harddrive replacements in the time between.

The current specs:
Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 420  @ 1.60GHz (singlecore, runs merrily with a big Scythe with the fan disabled - nice noise-wise).
ASUS P5B-MX, 2x1 gigabyte of whatever ram.
No-name, inefficient 350W PSU
120mm casefan
1xWD3200BUDT 2.5" 320GB WD AV, system + miscdata disk
2xWD6401AALS - WD Caviar Black 640gig, raid-mirror important stuff.

Everything is AES-256 encrypted, which is the major slowness factor, but it's also not powerful enough for the minecraft sprees I do with my friends every now and then (rendering the out-of-game worldmaps is WAY slow). The AES is heavy enough that I'm pretty far from maxing out disk speed.

Server runs Debian, and copying is done by a Win7 box pulling across the gigabit LAN, served by Samba (3.5.6). Haven't done a lot of smb nor proc/net tweaking.

Some power usage statistics:
~7.3W shut down (shut down, not standby - most older systems are like this)
~68W idle
~82W copying, ~33MB/s, ~65% CPU (50 kcryptd, 15 smbd)

Pretty interesting that it claims only ~65% CPU usage, btw, since it's clearly the CPU that's maxed out - doing anything on the box is s-l-o-w while copying.

I transplanted the disks to my testbox, a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz, different motherboard obviously, with CPU-fan and no case-fan, but same PSU. The stats there:
4.3W shutdown
~65-67w idle
~82W copying, ~45MB/s, ~50% CPU (kcryptd, nothing else above 0.x% :-))

That's almost fast enough not to buy a new server but...
1) I'd still like to be able to saturate my disks (and this box is clearly CPU limited as well, kernel crypto-loop doesn't multithread, at least not for one device).
2) I do need a testbox every now and then, and the current server is a bit too slow for some of the things I do... plus, I'd like to donate it to my brother, instead of the insanely slow P4-celeron I've been postponing fixing up for him for a couple of years ;-)
3) I'm certain I can get even lower power consumption.
4) I like fiddling with hardware :$

So, I've been pondering a bit as to what I need to get my grubby little hands on. Considering that my current slightly beasty desktop (i7-3770, 16gigs of ram, and a GTX460 graphics card) runs at... what is it, ~65-70W idle... I expect I can go somewhat lower for a server build.

But which CPU? I kinda want an i5, since those have the AES-NI instruction set, and then I'm guaranteed AES won't be a bottleneck. I guess just about any i3 will be able to saturate disk without AES-NI, but probably at higher power consumption.

And I have no clue what i3 vs. i5 is like with regards to power consumption - the Watt amount listed on Intel's site is TDP, which I understand to be more related to max heat than directly to power consumption... and at any rate, the current CPUs are damn efficient at power reduction when idle (which the box will be *most* of the time). Anybody got some realistic estimates what power consumption is with Ivy Bridge line of i3 and i5, idle as well as load?

Are there large differences in power consumption on various motherboards? Any particular boards that are good? (I don't need a crapload of features - decent gigabit NIC that works with linux, at least four SATA ports. 6-8 would be nice, but not a *requirement*, and while I don't need 6gbps sata it's probably best to go for that, if the new server is going to last 5+ years).

And what about heat? It's pretty nice that the old celeron can handle passive cooling, even under load - the server is in my living room, and my apartment is pretty small, so... noise is an issue.

I've slightly considered getting a Xeon, but have no idea whatsoever wrt. their power consumption - and it does seem a bit expensive to get a xeon + server motherboard, with the main reasoning being ECC support for the RAM. I'll probably be going for 2x4GB ram - a bit overkill, but then at least my demands for the next 5+ years should be met.

Oh, and I do want on-board graphics. Anything goes (80x50 textmode ;P), as long as it doesn't suck too much power. I'm obviously thinking on-cpu intel HD graphics.

So, that was the CPU muscle + power consumption bit. Next up: case and harddrive stuff. I do need a new case, since the current minitower is a bit too cramped - and it's too flimsy to properly absorb harddrive vibration.

Not sure what to go for; I don't need a super big tower, but I want something heavy&solid to dampen drives, and enough room that working with the box isn't cramped. I've also been considering some kind of hot-swap bay, but have no idea what brands too look for. I'd rather have something without bays where I can just pull out a drive, like this?, but I want the thing to be solid... and not add too much noise. Oh, and not fsck up things totally heat-wise. Also, what's Linux SATA hotswap support like these days? Like, doable on a standard motherboard without fancy controllers?

And I guess most decent cases come without PSUs - also a bit unsure what to look for, there. I want something power efficient and silent, and preferably with modular cabling (but not a deal-breaker if it doesn't have it). I've got a Corsair tx550m in my workstation, which is pretty nice - but 550W is overkill even for that machine. I wonder if it makes sense going for something with a lower Watt rating, since the server box is going to be *way* below that? There don't seem to be a lot of modular PSUs available below that power level, though, and especially not here in .dk. Also, a definite plus for the tx550m is that it provides very stable voltage levels.

I think that's it for now - dunno if I forgot something

1004

General Software Discussion / Re: Antivirus-less setup

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2012, 11:42 AM »

I gotta toss this EMET thing on top of my to-do list. It does look quite interesting. Any common hiccups to watch/look for in a network sized rollout of this that you know of?

-Stoic Joker (September 28, 2012, 11:21 AM)

Probably plenty - at least if you have any badly programmed (or übernazi-softwareprotectioncrapped) software installed. If you've got stuff that doesn't like DEP, it's probably gonna break bad on EMET

Then again, you can enable mitigations on a per-process basis, so it should be possible to roll out on a network-wide basis, as long as you do some thorough testing of the enabled profiles first.

And of course it's "just" mitigation - some of it has already been broken. It does raise the bar substantially for exploit code, though, and not all exploit writers are going to add EMET penetration on top of already complex exploits, since it's still a minority that runs EMET. So, as things are now, it's a decent extra bit of mitigation :-) (but yes, of course the Metasploit (and the far more sinister people you don't hear about) are playing around.)

1005

General Software Discussion / Re: Antivirus-less setup

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2012, 11:01 AM »

So to reinforce Stoic's earlier point about the first 50,000 who get hit by something new, it doesn't ultimately matter if you're one of them. But with hundreds of millions pf PCs in  the world, odds of you being in the first group to get hit are extremely slim.

-40hz (September 28, 2012, 10:29 AM)

...and if you install EMET, you further reduce the risk of being one of those lucky 50.000. Mitigation, baby, mitigation <3

1006

General Software Discussion / Re: Antivirus-less setup

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2012, 10:08 AM »

do you never look at youtube videos f0dder

-tomos (September 28, 2012, 10:02 AM)

A lot are available in html5 video formats. For those that aren't (and other flash content), I consider whether it's worth firing up my Chrome install, which I use for flash-requiring stuff (it also had AdBlockPlus and Ghostery, and of course Chrome's default click-to-play activation of Flash content). If I need browser Java (which is solely for the atrocious NemID crap), I boot up my locked-down linux VM.

1007

General Software Discussion / Re: Antivirus-less setup

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2012, 09:32 AM »

I wouldn't run a Windows machine without MSE and EMET. While I'm not likely to catch an infection because of the way my browser is set up[1], I can't see any good reason not to add a bit of extra protection - yes, there's a (in the normal case minimal, IMHO) performance penalty, but it's worth it.

[1]: FireFox without Java, Flash or AdobePDF plugins, with AdBlockPlus + NoScript + Ghostery + Certificate Patrol addons... also, all DNS requests go through DnsCrypt so I'm not getting MITM'ed there either (not a big chance of that happening at home on a wired connection, but still).

I wish there were an equivalent of chroot jail on Windows, but there's not

-apankrat (September 28, 2012, 08:29 AM)

Chroot isn't all what it's cranked up to be - if there's a local privilege exploit (which you'd also need on Windows to go from LUA->Admin), you're dead anyway. Yeah, it's an extra piece of mitigation and that's always useful, but it's definitely not a catchall.

Does anyone have any experience with Sandboxie or something similar? Sounds right, but not sure how well it works.

-apankrat (September 28, 2012, 08:29 AM)

Hummm, I'd personally go for a full VM - a bit more bother, but also more thorough isolation from the host. Sandboxie would be fine for testing out non-malicious software without having to clean up your system afterwards, but I wouldn't trust anything but a fullblown VM when security is involved.

1008

Living Room / Re: Barebone server: what else do I need to complete it?

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2012, 09:24 AM »

So...I'm still inclined to spec ECC for a server. But I'm an "old guy." So maybe some other people might want to put their tuppence in in this one?

-40hz (September 28, 2012, 09:13 AM)

Even with "advances in memory engineering", what about stuff like... cosmic radiation? Even if you only get a single-bit corruption every few years, a single-bit corruption inside a compressed datastream can ruin quite a lot.

I'm about to shop for a new home server, probably in October, and considering whether to go for ECC memory... but that does mean also going for a server motherboard and Xeon CPU, and that does end up in a somewhat other price class than a commodity i3 or i5.

1009

Living Room / Re: Barebone server: what else do I need to complete it?

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2012, 01:26 PM »

You don't need to worry about interface speed - harddrives are no near even 3gbps speeds (that's 300MB/s throughput), only high-end SSDs surpass that.

1010

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 15 less of a memory hog

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2012, 12:31 PM »

Oh, hardware acceleration, missed that - yep, that can be quite buggy. Drivers are usually optimized for gaming use, whereas the codepaths browsers have started exercising simply haven't been tested as well. I thought firefox was pretty picky about not enabling hw accel on 'bad' drivers though. Hm. Driver bugs should lead to stuff like crashes and graphics glitches, though, whereas your "buttons and links stop working" sound more like some (possibly old) badly coded addon that breaks because some FF internals have changed around a bit

1011

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 15 less of a memory hog

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2012, 12:01 PM »

J-Mac, what kind of addons have you got in there? Sounds like too massive b0rkage to be FF itself that has messed up, more likely to be some badly coded addon?

1012

Living Room / Re: SpammerScammer

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2012, 08:32 PM »

A denial of service is just that - a denial of service. Whether it's done by pure gigabits of data flooding, more clever SYN attacks, or by crashing the opponent - it's denial of service. Asking a lot of people to call a phone number is in effect a distributed denial of service.

For the rest of your post,
1) how do you tell from just an email address that "this is a scumbag"?
2) (apart from instigating a DDOS probably being illegal) how do we have any guarantee that the phone number mentioned is a scammer?
3) for the email (dis)service, mailbombing is going to put load on mail carriers along the way, suck up bandwidth, and probably get sending IPs blacklisted.

Where do the machines form the mailbombing (dis)service come from? If it's rented boxes, there's likely some service provider that's going to be pissed off - if not that, the next unlucky customer that gets the same IPs and can't send (legitimate) mails because the IPs are blacklisted.

If it's from a zombie botnet, well... *rolleyes*

1013

Living Room / Re: SpammerScammer

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2012, 11:09 AM »

If you have free long distance call redacted and fill up the mailbox. It is a scammer phone number. Don't forget to block your caller id. The goal is to fill up the mail box so no real victims get through

-Webpirate (September 26, 2012, 10:39 AM)

So now DoCo is a DDOS service?

1014

General Software Discussion / Re: Wicked Cool Unusual Features in Software

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2012, 11:16 AM »

Agree with 40hz.

Not sure what to think about this particular feature. I guess it's OK as an extra little touch - I kinda feel that if the "paste URL" button wasn't there, the waving would change from "a nice extra touch" to "meh, gimmicky UI".

1015

DC Gamer Club / Re: Stealth-focused Computer Games

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2012, 10:20 AM »

Thief^w  

1016

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... RAMdisk opinions

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2012, 10:19 AM »

Well, I just disabled - I thimk - the pagefile.  Don't see any significant RAM usage above and beyond the norm.  But, then, I'm just doing forum posts at the moment.  However, I normally have a bunch of stuff loaded at boot, so the actual program load is pretty hefty.

-barney (September 24, 2012, 08:23 PM)

I started disabling the pagefile when I had 1gig ram, I belive back in the win2k days - or perhaps early XP. A few things back then did cause problems, most notably I had to shut down every other process to play some games. With 2gig and XP (definitely before SP3, though!) I don't recall running into problems. Of course the amount of ram necessary to disable the pagefile will depend on your workloads.

Barring major malfunctions, I'll try this for a week or two (2), then reactivate the pagefile on a RAMdisk, see if there's a performance hit - or any other significant difference for that matter.

-barney (September 24, 2012, 08:23 PM)

I really don't see why anybody in their right mind would do this, though, considering the reason(nings) I've posted previously, and tomos' in the post right above this one as well.

Yes, if you're on a 32bit OS and have unadressable RAM, you could do it, and it might even sorta make sense - but unless you have stuffed a lot of unadressable RAM in your box (and then I'd be questioning your sanity ), you'd still a disk-based pagefile, since the meager amount that's normally unadressable wouldn't suffice for a system that actually needs to swap...

1017

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... RAMdisk opinions

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2012, 05:02 PM »

Sure thing, I'm all for that - and doing it myself. Just don't put the pagefile on ramdisk, as mentioned previously - it's better disabling it altogether if you got that kind of memory.

-f0dder (September 24, 2012, 04:29 PM)

OK, that's been expressed a few times now, but I do not see the difference between running the pagefile in memory or on a RAMdisk.

-barney (September 24, 2012, 04:38 PM)

If you disable the pagefile (System Properties -> 'Advanced' tab -> 'settings' button in 'Performance' group -> 'Advanced' tab -> 'Advanced' tab -> 'change' button in 'Virtual memory' group -> set to 'no paging file' for all partitions), you aren't "running the pagefile in memory", you're disabling it entirely.

Not swapping at all is even faster than swapping to memory... and since you're not using memory for a pagefile ramdisk, you have more memory to allocate from before swapping would be necessary. It really should be common sense :-)

Do note that you shouldn't disable the pagefile unless you always have enough free physical memory, even under high load, or you at least know the implications of what turning off the pagefile means. Windows doesn't really like running out of memory (but at least it doesn't go about OOM-killing processes like Linux does by default).

1018

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... RAMdisk opinions

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2012, 04:29 PM »

Wrong  .  Well, presumptive.

-barney (September 24, 2012, 04:13 PM)

No, right :-) *tongue-in-cheek*. Keep in mind that I'm referring to the "put pagefile on ramdisk" as insanity, not general use of ramdisks!

So, isn't that 1.5G RAM wasted?  It's not being used by system or software.

-barney (September 24, 2012, 04:13 PM)

Well, depending on OS and the memory reporting gadget, the 1.5gig of ram could be used as filesystem cache, which is reported as 'free memory' since the caches can be dropped/flushed as need be. Just a thing to keep in mind!

So why not make that a RAMdisk as mentioned previously, thus decreasing writes to HDD or SSD, thus decreasing wear & tear?

-barney (September 24, 2012, 04:13 PM)

Sure thing, I'm all for that - and doing it myself. Just don't put the pagefile on ramdisk, as mentioned previously - it's better disabling it altogether if you got that kind of memory.

1019

Living Room / Re: Interview with Richard Stallman

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2012, 03:44 PM »

I wonder if there's an English translation around (or if Google Translate does a nice enough job) for this little piece of rms visiting Denmark a bunch of years back. Sounds like a bit of an ass, as a person.

1020

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... RAMdisk opinions

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2012, 03:32 PM »

of our discussion was that a RAMdisk for temporary files and another for the swap file was probably the best way to go.

-barney (September 24, 2012, 03:26 PM)

Using a RAMdisk for swap has one acceptable use case: a system with >4GB RAM running a 32bit version of windows, where windows itself cannot access the >4GB ram. Otherwise, it's plain idiotic - the RAM you're swapping to would have been better spent serving memory requests instead of swap. Better get enough RAM and disable the pagefile altogether.

And in the situation where you have >4GB ram installed in a machine - why the heck aren't you running a 64bit OS then? :-)

1021

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... RAMdisk opinions

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2012, 02:59 PM »

I frequently (once or twice a day) do hard reboots, just to save time, and never have a corruption problem. (Granted, sometimes I just do a Firefox reboot, since the 100 windows with some PDFs and plug-ins galore is the main slow-down.) I also occasionally have OS lockups and never have corruption.  (I do try to make sure not to have the same files open by two users on the puter, which can be problematic.)

-Steven Avery (September 24, 2012, 02:40 PM)

You're joking, right? Please tell me you're joking.

NTFS is relatively resilient, but doing hard reboots like that is asking for a disaster. You might not be seeing all-out catastrophic filesystem bomb-out, but isn't the worst kind of corruption is the kind you don't discover until it's crept into your backup archives?

Thus I would not find the ramdisk acceptable on my most active data file. That is why I wonder if it is worth the effort for the temp files, where I do not care about losing data.

-Steven Avery (September 24, 2012, 02:40 PM)

In my experience, yes. I wouldn't be running important important data on a ramdisk, at least not without an UPS, but it's fine %TEMP% and firefox profiles - add a backup program works on file change notifications instead of stupid timer intervals, and you're pretty well off for not highly critical data.

1022

Developer's Corner / Re: WiX Installer - not really a review

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 03:41 PM »

Oh... that preparing to install dialog.  Yup.  Still there.

-wraith808 (September 23, 2012, 02:35 PM)

I know I'm �ber-sensitive to these kinds, but it annoys me a lot. One things is the up-front delay, though, another is the speed of installing itself. I assume that .msi based install of "a few large files" would be a lot better that when dealing with a zillion small files... but I guess authors going for .msi are more likely to go with those zillions of small files.

It's also very evident when doing uninstalls. Those zillions-of-files uninstalls can take a couple of minutes, where the .pak based ones take a couple of seconds. I almost get suspicious with fast installers these days, because I'm so used to the .msi madness

I started to use NSIS.  That's the last thing I used when I was doing installers, and I really liked them.  But the lack of activity on the boards is what made me start looking for something else.

-wraith808 (September 23, 2012, 02:35 PM)

I know the feeling. Inactivity? Bad! - but is it, really, that bad? It is for proprietary systems, but iirc NSIS is opensource?

1023

Developer's Corner / Re: WiX Installer - not really a review

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 02:26 PM »

Mine comes up pretty much instantly, and doesn't take that much longer than it would take to decompress the files and copy them to their locations.

-wraith808 (September 23, 2012, 02:16 PM)

I generally have 3+ seconds before the installer launches (even for the simple stuff), and installation taking a while (if a lot of small files (or registry entries) are involved). Contrast a .msi game installer with a bunch of small files to a nullsoft based installer with ".pak" files and... well

1024

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... RAMdisk opinions

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 02:16 PM »

They even requested formatting the server it ran on to use a specific cluster size under windows.

-40hz (September 23, 2012, 01:39 PM)

Say... what?

Might make sense to offer that as a performance tuning advice, but... as part of problem resolution? W T F? Also, it really shouldn't be necessary for performance tweaking, unless they're retards and don't do any kind of pre-allocation.

Pray tell, what software package or company name? Sounds like something to stay waaaaaaaaaaay clear of.

1025

Developer's Corner / Re: WiX Installer - not really a review

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 02:13 PM »

Well, all .msi installers I've used take a lot of time to "boot", and generally seem slow and sluggish - even if only dealing with a few megabytes worth of files. Nullsoft based installers, on the other hand, are crazy fast.

I do realize that .msi offers a lot of rollback and whatnot, but... meh.