PC Engines APU plan

I recently decided to upgrade my home firewall (pfSense on a PC Engines WRAP) by something more recent.  The new APU system from PC Engines looked quite good so I ordered one unit of the 4-gig model.  When I received it, I tried a few things with it but lacked time.  The next time I worked on it, it was dead.  I create an RMA, returned the unit, and got a working one about 3 weeks later.  My original plan was just to upgrade pfSense and run it on more recent hardware.  My WRAP was kind of slow in the WebGUI (not that bad, I don't edit the configuration every day) and I don't think it could do a good job for an OpenVPN setup.  I looked around and also found other options for small factor computers but I decided to go with the APU when I saw that its processor had virtualization extensions.  I thought that I could try running another system, side-by-side with the firewall, allowing me to have a server that would always be on (I currently run cacti, nagios and other daemons directly on my desktop, which is not the best thing).  The goal would be to have an owncloud server at home.

The big challenge with the APU is that there is no VGA output, so the install must be done using serial console.  I had to install a tftp server on my desktop, and configure httpd to server the install files for Centos 7 and I performed the install via VNC.  Wasn't too hard.

Thes guide helped me with the install:

http://wiki.polaire.nl/doku.php?id=install_centos_6.5_on_pc_engine_s_apu_over_pxe

This website helped me to begin with Centos 7, which is quite different from 5 and 6:

http://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=CentOS_7

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

General linux performance troubleshooting

Here's a list of commands that you should execute and then share the output to someone who can help you figure out what resource is the bottleneck in your system. Note, it requires the  sysstat  and  procps  packages (ubuntu and RHEL and its derivatives): uptime vmstat 1 10 iostat -xN 2 10 mpstat -P ALL 3 10 pidstat 1 10 free -mw (or free -m, if your OS doesn't support -w)  uptime is to see the load averages on the system. vmstat is mostly used to tell if the system is swapping or not. If you see significant numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns, your system is most likely swapping (using the hard drive as RAM), which usually slows performance a lot. iostat is mostly used to determine if your disk subsystem is not able to cope with the load. If you see one or more lines that shows 100 or close almost constantly, it is probably the case.  If it is your swap volume, you probably saw numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns in the  vmsta...
Read more

Networker automated recovery testing using the REST API - introduction

One feature that is lacking from Networker, compared to some of its competitors, is the built-in automatic recovery testing. However, when there's an API, there is a way.  Networker's REST API is not perfect, but it allows the backup administrator to perform queries about Networker resources (objects). As my workload is going up, I realize that one of the tasks that I tend to skip the most is the periodical recovery tests.  Don't forget that a a backup that is not tested should be considered non-successful. I also found out that my recovery tests were not diverse enough. When I started this project, I knew a little bit about REST APIs, and nothing about JSON processing. With the Networker REST API documentation, and the help of a friend and Networker Support staff, I was able to create HTTP queries with Postman,  cURL and jq . Once I got the queries that I needed, I put them in a bash script that would somehow select one backup, and then restore it. My first attem...
Read more

Tips for being a better system administrator

Here are a few tips that I have discovered or implemented during my career, that can help anyone get better results: Follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy  or better 3 copies of the data 3 different media 1 copy offsite Test your backups regularly. Ideally, automate your recovery tests. Use Whatever-as-code as much as you can. IaC is the first that comes to my mind, but using code to define objects and their properties have several advantages: Auto-documentation of changes Ability to easily rollback (using source code management like Git) Makes it easier for standardization an compliance Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, Terraform, Pulumi are good examples Maintain a changelog of all the major changes in your infrastructure (that isn't already "documented" because you're using IaC). Keep track of your hardware inventory and plan your renewals and warranty extension purchases. Build a spreadsheet with all the components that you manage and make sure that everyone on the sysadmi...
Read more