by siyb

Over a year ago I installed the first harddrive upgrade on Sycorax, the siyb.de server. (Un)fortunately harddrive space doesn’t last forever, so that recent events forced me to upgrade the storage hardware once more. Due to a lack of money I choose to use mdadm to create a software raid above 4 newly purchased harddrives that have been connected to a PCI SATA II controller, anything else would have force me to buy a new motherboard, CPU and RAM.

Ingredients:

• 1* SATA Controller PROMISE SATA300 TX4
• 4* SAMSUNG SATAII 750 GB F1

Although I am really happy with my Seagate harddrives that I have used in the first Raid, I have chosen to use Samsung hdds this time because they are quiet, cool and supposedly last for a long time (we will see :>). This report will feature hardware assembly as well as setup of the encrypted software raid.

First of all I had to prepare the server for the new hardware by connecting an additional cable to my Enermax Liberty ELT400AWT and installing an extra fan, to cool the hdds, that would be placed above one another and therefore require some active cooling.

After installing the controller card the hdds could be connected and the machine was ready to be turned on again

Lets build the raid, I found some good tutorials online that helped me setting up the mdadm raid, they can be found in the appendix. I suggest that you take a look at them if you are planning to create a software raid yourself, my notes are just “guidance” and a small reference, but I will not going to explain any little detail. Anyway, here is what I did (Debian Lenny, standard Debian kernel in use):

Installation of required packages:

apt-get install hashalot cryptsetup mdadm

Software raids consist of partitions rather than physical devices, so naturally the first thing to do was to create partitions on the new drives that I could use to assemble a raid, I choose to use cfdisk for comfort, but you might as well consider fdisk or other tools.

cfdisk /dev/sdb
cfdisk /dev/sdc
cfdisk /dev/sdd
cfdisk /dev/sde

I created one partition per drive, which left me with a total number of 4 partitions to use with my raid5.

mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level=5 –raid-devices=4 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1

Before formatting the raid device /dev/md0, I took some time to encrypt the device:

cryptsetup –verbose –verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/md0

After that formatting is a piece of cake

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md0 cryptraid
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/cryptraid

Adding the following lines to /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab allows the device to be mounted automatically when starting the computer

In /etc/crypttab:
cryptraid /dev/md0 none luks

In /etc/fstab:
/dev/mapper/cryptraid /mnt/storage ext3 defaults 0 0

The result:

/dev/mapper/storage 2063G 13G 1945G 0.7 [………………………………………………………….] /mnt/storage

• Linux Wiki - mdadm
• Rebuilding software raids
• Linux Home Networking - Linux Software Raid howto

by siyb

mount.at will go down at approximately 14:00 CET today due to maintenance related issues. Please be patient, we will try to keep the downtime as short as possible. In the period of this downtime the following services will not be available: jabber, svn, web, irc, game and teamspeakserver.

Please keep in mind that you are able to reach our IRC network by using a different server.

//edit: jabber service is available now again, please note that you will have to reregister with the icq/msn transport(s)
//edit2: Man this is really beginning to PMO … well mount.at will hopefully be online again tomorrow …

by siyb

We’ve just setup an UrbanTerror server on mount.at. It is accessible by the public and runs on 80.64.129.154:27960. UrbanTerror is a tactical shooter, that did depend on an existing Quake III installation in the past, but is now released as a standalone product, that is available to anyone, completly free of charge. You may acquire UrbanTerror from one of the many official mirror sites right now, as you will notice, UrbanTerror runs on Linux as well as Windows. If you get the chance drop by for some action and leave feedback, so that we can improve performance and gameplay (maps etc)

by siyb

Mount.at is up and running again. We upgraded the hardware to what we think will last for some time (core 2 quad, 4gig ram). The reason mount.at went offline (yet again) was the defective onboard nic, we suppose the mainboard was just beginning to rot, because we encountered some issues with brand new memory as well, anyway it was time for an upgrade.

The jabber server and all other services should be available again by now, apart from the IRC service which will be offline until further notice.

by siyb

Mount.at is offline … yet again, the reasons are still unknown but we are planning to inspect the server tomorrow, so stay tuned. For now, the Jabber service as well as the IRCd, some websites and gameservers remain unreachable. We apologize :/

By the way, we have a roundrobin in place now. Pointing your IRC client to irc.teranetworks.de should always get you on a working server of our network if you connect via SSL on port 6697.

Update: We just found out that hades is still running, a switch in the data center went dead. According to our source, it will be replaced sometime in the next 24 hours. Stay tuned!

Update #2: Here we are again. Things worked out faster than we thought. \o/