The Acer Aspire Revo R3610 as a Linux Server.

For many years I have been building Linux servers for my own web and mail services.
I've always limited by hardware costs to $500 or less by reusing old equipment.
Over the last several months, I have had hard drive failures on 3 of my servers, two of which I could live without. Last week, when the third system (my mail server) started to experience failures, I started looking for a replacement server.

I started to look at the PogoPlug as a possible solution. My new PogoPlug had just recently arrived in the mail, and it seemed like a good candidate as a mail server replacement. With is ultra small footprint and its low power consumption, I started hacking it with grand designs in mind. Unfortunately, after getting to the point of being able to install OpenPogo packages to a USB drive, I became cautious about making too many changes to the PogoPlugs sofware. Partly, due to the fact that I have come to enjoy what PogoPlug does best, making data on a hard drive that you have at home, available on the web for yourself and others (if you choose), in a safe a secure manner. Thus, I dropped any further major tweeking for now, until I can see a cleaner safer way of adding additional Linux services to the PogoPlug via OpenPogo, without compromising it's security or bricking it.

I took a trip to Fry's hoping to find a solution via a Shuttle X2700 mini-pc server. I only wanted to spend about $400 at most on the new server, but found that I would be at about $600 after buying the bare bones system, then adding the CPU memory and hard drive. So I lost interest in that route and looked at what they offered in terms of complete systems. Here, I came across the Acer Revo. It's an affordable mini-pc system that uses the ATOM processor, the R3610 is a 64bit processor with 2 cores. Linux actually reports 4 cores because each core can run 2 threads. I bought the R3610 for $329 plus tax. This gets me all I need for a server plus more.

The Acer Aspire Revo R3610 came with Windows 7. But I want Linux to be the main OS.
When I initially tried to boot the Ubuntu installer from a USB drive. I was disappointed to see the message "No Operating system found". I reformatted to USB drive to NTFS and used some procedures that I found on the net to make the USB drive bootable via an original Windows Vista bootable Install CD, but that did not work either as I got messages like "Bootmngr was not found." or "OS was not found.". The simple solution was just a few steps.

1. Download the iso for Ubuntu Server or Ubuntu Desktop.
   
2. Cleanly format a USB drive as FAT32.
3. Use the "Universal Netboot Installer" to place a bootable install of 64 bit Ubuntu Linux on the USB Drive. Just point the unetbootin utility to the Ubuntu iso and the USB drive letter of the newly formatted FAT32 USB drive.
4. Plug the USB drive into the Acer Revo.
5. Set the Acer Revo to boot from the USB drive.
6. Partition about half of the 160Gig drive to run Linux, and leave the other half for Windows 7.
7. Install Ubuntu...
   

Ultimately, I'd like to be able to run Windows 7 VM os to Linux via Xen.

But, I'll have to leave that experiment for later...

Acer Aspire Revo Specs:

AR3610-U9012Genuine Windows^® 7 Home Premium , Intel® Atom™ Processor N330 (1MB L2 cache, 1.60GHz, 533MHz FSB), 2GB (1/1) DDR2 800 SDRAM, 160GB SATA hard drive, multi-in-one card reader, NVIDIA® ION™ graphics, gigabit LAN, 802.11b/g/Draft-N WLAN

Rails (2.3.2) Install, MySql issues

I recently set up Rails 2.3.2 on my Windows Vista Laptop.
I just installed Ruby and Rails (2.3.2) on my Windows Vista Laptop.
I came across a problem in getting MySql working with Rails...

I used the following tutorial to perform the install:

• http://allaboutruby.wordpress.com/2006/01/09/installing-rails-on-windows-step-by-step-tutorial/
  

At Step 3, if you click on "About your application’s environment", you may get the message "We're sorry, but something went wrong". If you do, continue with the steps below. If not, you are probably okay.

When you click on "About your application’s environment" here is what you should see:

Ruby version 1.8.6 (i386-mswin32)
RubyGems version 1.3.1
Rack version 1.0 bundled
Rails version 2.3.2
Active Record version 2.3.2
Action Pack version 2.3.2
Active Resource version 2.3.2
Action Mailer version 2.3.2
Active Support version 2.3.2
Application root C:/Ruby/firstproject
Environment development
Database adapter mysql
Database schema version 0

If you get the message "We're sorry, but something went wrong", here's what you need to do...

Dowload and install the following file into \Ruby\bin:

• http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/InstantRails-win/InstantRails/mysql/bin/libmySQL.dll

Create the "firstproject" database and the "rails" user using MySql tools. Then...

Edit the file in /Ruby/firstproject/config/database.yml:

development:
adapter: mysql
database: firstproject
username: rails
password: yourpassword
host: localhost
port: 3306
pool: 5
timeout: 5000

test:
adapter: mysql
database: firstproject
username: rails
password: yourpassword
host: localhost
port: 3306
pool: 5
timeout: 5000

production:
adapter: mysql
database: firstproject
username: rails
password: yourpassword
host: localhost
port: 3306
pool: 5
timeout: 5000

Restart rails, and you should get the appropriate response when you click on "About your application’s environment".

-Best...

References:

• http://forums.aptana.com/viewtopic.php?t=7563

Keywords:

• Problems with mysql
• gem mysql install fails
• webrick "can't convert fixnum into string"

QuickenBooks Upgrade to 2009 Pro...

Just upgraded from QuickBooks 2006 Pro to 2009 Pro.
After the upgrade, QuickBooks converts the data file so that it is compatable with the latest version (2009 Pro), and this process seemed to run fine.

Problem:
The main problem that I ran into after the upgrade was that QuickBooks 2009 Pro would crash when I would try to run the last bank reconciliation report (that was last done on the prior version).
I ran "Help->Update QuickBooks" to update the program, but it continued to crash when I would run the prior back reconciliation report.

Solution:
Then I found "File->Utilities->Rebuild Data". It required that you execute another backup. But, after the rebuild, QuickBooks 2009 Pro no-longer crashed when running the last bank reconciliation report.

So, if you are up against this problem of QuickBooks crashing after an upgrade.

1. Install QuickBooks 2009.
2. Use the "Help->Update QuickBooks" to update the program to its latest.
3. Let QuickBooks 2009 Pro update your data file to it's latest.
4. Run "File->Utilities->Rebuild Data" on the file to ensure that avoid the "crash on reporting bug".

-Best...

Cygwin "unable to remap..."

After thinking that Cygwin was finally "stably" installed on Vista-64bit, I started to see "unable to remap..." errors while running a perl CPAN module install.

What was that command that I had to run?.... Oh yeah, "rebaseall".

• Start up an ash session from a cmd.exe window.
• cd c:\cygwin
• \bin\ash.exe
• Then from the ash prompt: /bin/rebaseall
• Then start up a Cygwin window... and everything should be working again.

-endCommunication!

Firefox Scrapbook woes...

I love to use the scrapbook plug-in. But a I've come across a problem...
I used the same scrapbook directory over the network on 2 different computers at the same time (which is not recommended by the way). As a result, the data that I have added via either computer is in the Scrapbook directory, but the scrapbook.rdf file only contains the data from 1 or the computers (the last computer that saved it's scrapbood.rdf index).

Anyhow, I hope to find a way to sync the rdf file with the actual data that is contained in the Scrapbook directory.


href=http://www.justthink.it/firefox/scrapbookSync/

Cygwin.bat on Vista-64bit

After installing Cygwin on Vista-64bit, I found that bash shell would start but no unix commands like 'ls' were available. Now, I had fixed this problem on my laptop, a while back... not sure about all the details. But, here's the Cygwin.bat script that starts things up...


@echo off

@REM Cygwin Startup script for Vista-64bit

C:
chdir C:\cygwin\bin

set CYGPATH=C:\cygwin\bin;C:\cygwin\sbin;C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin;
set PATH=%CYGPATH%;%PATH%
set DISPLAY=:0.0

REM echo %PATH%

bash --login -i


Cygwin still seems to have problems with forking new processes on Vista, but all I really need it for now is for some perl scripting...

-Yeah...

Nvidia 650i Ultra Motherboard (Long Beeps)

I'm making this posting because I found very little data on the problem of getting Long Beeps upon reboot on my computer, which has an Nvidia 650i Ultra motherboard.

After much web searching, I was very disappointed that there was no data available regarding beep-codes for the Nvidia 650i Ultra motherboard. There were a few mentions about re-seating memory cards and video card, and with that not working, the mother board may be dead.

So, I re-seated by memory and video cards, but I still got the long beep.

I was finally resigned to getting a new mother board, when I decided to test for a failure in the power supply, by removing some of the memory, to lower power consumption. After removing 2 of the 4 memory chips, I found that the system was able to boot up. This also lead me to believe that the problem could also be a memory issue, so I swapped memory around, (after fully switch off the computer, don't rely on the soft switch on the front) and I was able to isolate the faulty memory card.

So, that was cool. Rather than having to find a new mother board or replacing the power supply, all I had to do was buy a new 2gig memory card. The bottom line is, that long beeps can also be caused by a bad memory card (on Nvidia 650i Ultra motherboards). Come to think of it, I did have several brown outs about 1 week earlier that took my computers down several times (my UPS needed a new battery).

-Later...