vincentkong.com

During my shopping frenzy, I got the Shuttle KPC K45 from Canada Computers where they built it as a ready-to-go system. Overall I was pretty happy with it, but it had 2 problems: the CPU and hard drive was slightly overheated at 46°C and 45°C, and it was loud; sounding like a hand held vacuum cleaner.

Intel Stock Fan

I opened the case and found out that Canada Computers only installed cheap Intel CPU fan that wasn’t PWM controllable. This meant the fan would always run at it’s top speed (approx. 2300 rpm) and was the reason for the loud noise. They also didn’t bother to install case fan. It was pretty obvious I needed to install a new cooling system for my Shuttle, otherwise it might die of overheat.

AF9225 PWM

I went with Arctic Cooling, (good reviews, and low cost). More specifically, I used the AF9225 PWM for the case fan, and Alpine 7 GT for the CPU.  The fan for Alpine 7 GT was actually smaller than the Intel stock fan, but it was also the only CPU fan which could fit inside the Shuttle.

Alpine 7 GT

With 2 fans installed the system was only making a humming sound compared to the preivous vaccum cleaner as the the CPU and case fan running at 1350 rpm and 800 rpm respectively.   Even with the slower rpm the temperatures for the CPU and hard drive still dropped to 42°C, and 36°C.  Considering that the cost was only $7.99, and $10.99 for the case and CPU fan, it was a well made investment.

After installing Ubuntu on my IBM desktop, I found that the operating system would freeze after being idle for a random period of time (2 hours – 2 days).

Here are some possible fixes that I found.

Fix 1:

Set the noapic nolapic pci=noacpi parameters in the Grub kernel. In the /boot/grub/menu.lst look for the following:

title     Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-15-generic
root      (hd0,0)
kernel    /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=XXX-XXX-XXX ro quiet splash
initrd    /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic
quiet
savedefault

Add the noapic nolapic pci=noacpi parameters in the kernel line after the splash word.

Note:

ACPI == Advanced Config and Power Interface
APIC == Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller

acpi=off (disables whole ACPI system)
noapic (tells kernel not to use the APIC)
nolapic (disables “local” APIC even if it is on in BIOS)

Fix 2:

Uninstall the acpid - Utilities for using ACPI power management package.
From the command line:

$ sudo apt-get remove acpid

This is a high level overview of what I did to build my server at home.

Hardware for the Server

For my server I recycled an older desktop, which works well since most unix operating systems uses less resources than Microsoft Windows.

Hardware Specifications for My Server:

Building the Server

I decided to build a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform for my server. For the Linux operating system, I chose Ubuntu because it was very easy to install, provided a lot of documentation online, as well as it had great community support.

Setting up the Network/Router

For the server I manually gave it a static local IP address 192.168.1.100. In my router I enabled port forwarding for ports 80 (for HTTP) and ports 22 (for SSH) to forward to 192.168.1.100.

Registering a Domain Name

To register for a domain name I use GoDaddy because they are currently the cheapest provider that I can find, and domain managing was through their web based interface which makes things really easy.

Setting up Dynamic DNS

My ISP provider provides me with a dynamic IP address, therefore I had to search for a DNS service that provided dynamic DNS support. I registered at ZoneEdit because it provides the service free for up to 5 domains. After successfully registering, ZoneEdit provided me with two name servers which I had to update my domain name to use through GoDaddy.

Setting up Dynamic DNS client

I use ddclient to update my dynamic DNS entries for ZoneEdit. The client is ran as a service which get executed every 5 minutes. When it awakes, it connects to my router and extracts the WAN IP address. If the address has changed then it’ll update my entry in ZoneEdit.

After I finish configuring everything I’m able to connect to my server using the domain name I registered at GoDaddy vincentkong.com. I can now then setup the rest of the services that I want to be available on my server. e.g. Apache, FTP, SSH, SMTP, etc.