[PLUG] Laptop as Server?

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 11:21:40PM -0700, Tim Wescott wrote:
> My #1 son and I are in mild disagreement.  I've got an old Dell laptop 
> (Latitude 26something) that I've put Xubuntu on and am re-purposing as 
> a  version control server (later internal web server for testing and 
> probably Dirvish for, well, survival).

You can do this, but:

1) Keep it cool.  Perhaps one of those fan platforms will work, or
you can place the whole thing on top of a large box with a big slow
fan in it.  This will help lifetime.

2) Use an external disk for dirvish/rsync, which really thrashes the
backup drive.  Strongly suggested.  An eSATA Cardbus card connected
to an external Vantec Nextar single-slot HDD dock ("drive toaster")
and a large 3.5inch SATA drive (3-5x what you are backing up) means
you still have the backup drive after the laptop dies.  Using a drive
toaster, you can even hot-swap and rotate drives, for air-gap security.

Note - the double slot Vantecs don't work, at least with my eSATA
hardware and recent production kernels.  

So you are out some expense and some extra power, but it will greatly
increase the survivability and robustness of your server/backup system,
and take a major source of heat and early failure (thrashing hard disk)
out of the laptop.  You may want to use one of the network speed
throttling options for dirvish/rsync when you back up the laptop 
itself, or its bethren. 

Three weeks ago, I used dd to copy my laptop main hard drive to another
drive in the ultrabay, as a backup measure before a trip.  Bad idea.  
It overheated the main drive - thousands of I/O errors after that.  
Fortunately, I had yet another older drive copy.  Color me paranoid.

If your Dell laptop is too old to support Cardbus, you might need to 
re-think the above, and figure out how to get some I/O speed out of the
laptop.  For really old laptops, this is the Achilles heel, they were
designed to talk to modems and USB mice, not networks and fast drives
and high data rates.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs