Quest for a Low-Power Home Server

brian — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:03:00 +0000

For quite awhile I’ve been interested in setting up a low-power machine to do my home server tasks and allow for some geeky linux experiments. After doing the initial cost-benefit analysis it didn’t appear that I’d be able to build anything that would be cheap enough to give a reasonable return on investment, in terms of power consumption. However, after months I finally came across the MSI Wind PC barebones at NewEgg.

My amazing wife bought it for me as a gift, and I’ve been nipping at the bit to get this thing going. This little guy has a low-power Intel Atom processor on-board and appears to be plenty of power for my needs. Also, I won’t need to purchase any additional hardware. I already have 200-pin DDR2 RAM that I pulled from my iMac, and I have a few SATA hard drives laying around to choose from. To start I’ve configured it with a 2.5″ laptop hard drive since it will consume less power and be less “loudy” (something a college professor of mine used to say – still cracks me up). I may add a larger drive in the 5.25″ bay for some storage if I need it later. I opted to leave it without an optical drive, since I can easily install GNU/Linux from a USB drive. I’ve installed a server configuration of Ubuntu 8.10 so far. When idle, the server only consumes 21 watts.

Here are some of my plans for the server, which I may write about in the future:

Run a VPN server for my home network, possibly OpenVPN
Build a web-based Wake-on-LAN system so I can wake up my iMac from an iPhone shortcut on my home screen, even while on Edge connectivity
A backup relay, to upload important data from my network to an off-site location

Fedora Printing and HPLIP

brian — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:55:21 +0000

Last summer, I setup my HP DeskJet 930C printer to my linux server running Fedora 7. I used the included CUPS server to share the printer with the rest of my network, including a Windows XP box, and two Macs running Leopard. It was working great until a few months ago when printing just stopped working from all of the network hosts. From the Windows machine, the queue window now had “access denied, failed to connect” within the title bar. Who knows what caused all of this, maybe a scheduled yum update or radiation from a meteor shower. Not knowing why it suddenly broke, I started tweaking settings in CUPS and Samba, but nothing worked. I used yum to upgrade to Fedora 8, but CUPS alone still didn’t work.

I did some searching and found this guide which describes hplip, a tool developed by HP for linux and their printers. The tool seemed to be installed but gave me an error that the GUI was missing. I had to run the following as root to install the necessities:

yum install hplip-gui PyQt

Then, as root, I ran hp-setup. This will take you through setting up the printer. Mine was already listed, so I actually ran hp-toolbox and deleted the existing one. Then I ran hp-setup again and recreated it with the desired settings. After that the printer was accessible from the Macs!

To get it accessible in Windows, I just had to install Bonjour for Windows (from Apple). Then the Bonjour Printer Wizard found the printer. The first time through I tried the latest HP driver for Windows that I had installed, but that didn’t work. Doubtful that it would make a difference, I tried the Generic Postscript driver and it actually worked! So now my network printer is working again.

I have a feeling that Fedora 8 has better Bonjour support (if Fedora 7 had any), so that could also be part of the solution. Hopefully this experience helps someone else!

Digital Mustache » server

Quest for a Low-Power Home Server

Fedora Printing and HPLIP