EntBlog
Code, 3D, Games, Linux and much more...

Building a NAS

I have been building a NAS in my spare time for the last months. I wanted this machine for backing up my other machines, storing movies and TV series for my media center, storing recordings from the TV, etc etc. I could have bought a specific machine for this purpose, but I found more interesting and funny building it on my own. These were the objectives I had in mind when designing the machine:

• A 24/7 machine (running all the day)
• Small
• Quiet
• Low power consumption
• Easily expandable with new disks without losing data
• RAID 5
• Break the TB barrier
• Being able to transfer saturating the Gigabit ethernet port
• With a customized Linux OS

And well, I think that I have been able to get all my objectives. This is my first modding, so I encountered lot of problems. Sure the next time I will do it better.

The following sections are a worklog of how I made this machine. Enjoy it.

Click to read the full article »

Fon Community

My host is joining the Fon Movement, a free WiFi community oriented towards sharing home internet connections to the world. Sharing your connection allows you to use any Fon node in the world for free.

There are already lots of nodes around the globe. You can check your neighborhood here.

What really impressed me is that they are selling is FON Social Router (La Fonera) for just 5 €/$. A 802.11g router with a linux 2.4.0 inside! I couldn’t resist such a bargain.

If you live in Spain, like me, Pc Actual is offering the router, 400 skypeout minutes, skype starter kit and a guide of Pc Tricks in this page.

And now, waiting for it…

UPS for Linux

I’m tired of the electric shortages I am suffering these days at home (where this blog an other services I use frequently are hosted) so I decided to buy an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for my server. Without doing too much investigation I bought a unit from Belkin: FH6350efUNV.

I’m really surprised with the Quality-Price ratio offered by this product. For less than 60€ I have an unit that properly notifies events (on battery event, on line power event, on low battery event, etc), mails me when each of this events get fired and monitors UPS status in real time. And all of this compatible with my Gentoo Linux.

Programs for Linux that come with the product are binaries without source code. I found troubles with some of them (I was unable to send customized mails) so I started looking for a open source solution. And here I faced NUT.

Network UPS Tools is a collection of programs for monitoring and administering UPS hardware under Linux using a client/server architecture. After hours investigating (Belkin FH6350efUNV unit is not officially supported by the last version 2.0.1) I discovered the driver that worked perfectly with my hardware: Powermust Driver. Powermust reports all the information (with the exception of the temperature variable) I had with the propietary software distributed by Belkin. All the notification system works perfectly with this driver.

So, if you are looking for a cheap and effective UPS unit for your linux, I really recommend buying one of the Belkin F6H series.

10 Security Guidelines to protect your server box in Internet

I’m not an expert system administrator, but it is one of my hobbies. I describe here a checklist of things I have learned playing with my linux box (the one I use for my blog) in the last years. Although the guidelines are generic to any Operating System the examples given are specific for Gentoo Linux. I expect to help anyone configuring a secure server.

Click to read the full article »

Running your own server (@home)

I wanted to start a topic (the first on Linux, I promise more on this) about the hardware machine where this blog is hosted: a machine installed in one corner of my living room. I bought the box to be the server for all my machines at home (personal computer, media center, videogame consoles, ip camera, fileserver…). Being network security one of my hobbies I am always playing with security tools. That is one of the reasons why I decided to host this blog in my home server: to play with a new toy.

In the past, whenever I installed a linux distribution (SUSE most of the times) I always finished mutating it to my own distribution due to the fact that these clasic distributions evolve too slow. This was frustrating and time consuming for me because I had to mantain lot of packages and some big changes (gcc, glibc) could break the system. When I was starting to build my own personal distribution (based on Linux From Scratch) I discovered Gentoo. Gentoo Linux is the perfect distribution to me. It is based on source (every package you install must be compiled) and it is continuously evolving like an organic system.

This is the current hardware configuration for my Linux Box:

• Shuttle Barebone ST62k
• Pentum IV Celeron 2.4Ghz 1Gb Ram
• Crystalfontz CFA-631 LCD Module

I have an internet connection with a dynamic IP. To be always accessible I’m using the services from DynDNS.

And that is enough for today, my next article on this topic will be about tips & tricks on security to avoid to be owned.

Linux in NintendoDS

I bought a SuperCard for my NintendoDS. I will be playing with the free SDK for the next weeks. Investigating the DS Scene I discovered DSLinux: a linux distribution for Nintento DS. You can’t do great things at the moment (I have been unable to mount the SD card nor connect to my router using then WiFi connection) but the project is friki enough to be commented.