After clicking on the picture there is a “Download” link in the lower left, click to see image in its original size! (8000px+ wide!!)

Außenalster:

Außenalster 2012-01-20

Binnenalster:

Binnenalster 2012-01-20

This work by Nicolas Fischer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I bought a lot of stuff along with the HP ProLiant MicroServer which needs to put into the small tower of the server. I do show in this chapter what to install how and in which sequence. Basically this is a pretty easy task, but in case you did not bought one of this MicroServers and you want to know how the device looks from the inside you can check out the pictures I made.

Index

Instead of simply writing one big blog entry I decided to split up my report into multiple parts:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Components
• Part 3: Software Installation
• Part 4: Assembly & Configuration
  

Working on the system board

Removing the system board

To remove the system board you do need to open the tower. Basically I recommend to check the manual from HP how to open the tower and so on. HP does provide a nice descriptions which really shows every step and move to execute.

To open the tower you do have to open the front door with the key and unscrew the screw on the back of the tower. Than you should be able to slide gently the top of the tower off the tower.

As the next step you should remove the hard disks and unscrew the blue screws aside of the system board. In my case a needed a special screwdriver with a torx (“star”) as a tip. You will need the same screwdriver later one when you need to remove the back plane where you need to put the iLO-Card in later on.

Next step is to unlock the cables very carefully from the cable brackets. To be on the save side you should open all brackets and lose all cables. Then you can pull on the handle at the front of the system board and the system board will slide out. Be careful when doing so because there are several cables connected to the board. Also disconnect these cables. It is very easy to reconnect them because all of them do only fit into a specific port or are color coded as you can see on my screenshots.

Installation iLO-Card

Please check the manual of the iLO-Card for the official installation procedure. In addition to it you can read my description.
Before touching the iLO-Card you should ground yourself so that the iLO is not getting damaged by some kind of electricity your body will submit. As soon you have removed the system board you can insert the iLO-Card into the slot nearest to the biggest heat-sink. As the next step you do need to remove the back plane at the rear of the tower which covers the slot. To do so slide down the cover of the slots and unscrew the screw with the screw driver you already needed to remove the system board. The next step is to slowly slide the system board back into the tower and to reconnect all cables. Do not lock the system board by now, because you still need to install the USB-Stick (next step)

Installation USB-Stick

HP was really thinking in advance when they decided to add an internal usb slot to the ProLiant MicroServer. This slot is placed quite close to the huge SATA-Connector on the system board. To be able to mount my USB-Stick into that slot I had to slide out the system board a little bit and than I simply inserted my “FreeNAS” USB-Stick into that port.

After putting it there I carefully pushed the system board back again than secure the system board by screw-in the blue screws again. At least I secured the cables by using the cable brackets at the end and do not forget the cable brackets aside of the hard disk slots!

Finishing the work on the system board

By now the system board is back again at the place where it belongs. Before continuing to the installation of the hard disks you still need to fix the installed iLO-Card at the slot of the rear of the tower. To do so fix it with the screw removed at the installation step of the iLO-Card from the back plane and slide up the cover again. That’s it!

Test Drive

Before adding the additionally purchased hard disks I just wanted to do a test drive of the system. Therefore I wanted to try to boot up my FreeNAS from the USB-Stick, accessing the iLO and see how FreeNAS responses on the system. I do recommend this step because if something is malfunctioning the hard disks are still original boxed etc.. In my case I decided to insert (first slot) the 250GB hard disk supplied by HP only.

Than I connected it to the power grid, connected the system as well the iLO board with an Ethernet cable to my 1GBit/s switch, added a monitor (you have to connect it to the port on the  iLO-Card !!), an USB mouse and keyboard to it.

BTW: Check the CD supplied by HP. On it you will find a link to the handbook to your MicroServer…. very strange HP really did not put it on the CD. Instead they offer only the link to download it. Or click here (hopefully HP won’t kill me):
German: http://www.hp.com/support/HP_Proliant_MicroServer_UG_gr
English: http://www.hp.com/support/HP_Proliant_MicroServer_UG_en

Results:

I pressed not a single button and the system booted straight from the usb stick into FreeNAS… very sexy. At the end of the boot process FreeNAS will ask you for the console setup. I decided not to continue because I wanted to add the new hard disks first. Therefore I selected “Shutdown”.
After the system shutdown I disconnected the power and attached devices to continue the hard disk installation.

Installation of the hard disks

Installing the hard disks is a pretty easy task, but HP does not supply any screws to screw the purchased hard disks into the frames. Isn’t that some kind of strange??
For me that was not a big problem, because I collected a lot of screws from computers of the last years. But to the plastic frames from HP does not fit every screws… see screenshots.
I decided not to use the hard disk supplied by HP, because the 250GB is quite small compared to the 2TB drives I bought and especially in case of noise and power consumption I do feel that I should use the western digital green series only.
I already found usage for this disk… as separated drive of my workstation where I could install Windows on.

After putting all hard disks into the frames simply slide them in from left to right until you can lock them. In case you want to mount five instead of only four hard disks you can use the 5 1/4 slot for the fifth drive. In case you want to do this you have to purchase an additional frame/adapter to put a 3 1/2 drive into a 5 1/4 drive. In my case I will keep the 5 1/4 slot free for maybe putting there a bluray writer or tape drive in a few month.

Now it is time to put back the top on the tower. You assemble the rest of the parts in the opposite sequence as you did in the step a the beginning.

Configuration

The configuration of the system using FreeNAS is very easy. After having the server assembled and FreeNAS installed on the USB-Stick. You should simply power on the server and boot up FreeNAS.

When the system is up there are two comfortable options to configure the system:

1. You can use the the command line. FreeNAS is offering a very simply and clean menu which allows you to do all basic configuration. You can see the menu on the screenshot I added in this article showing the system booted without installed hard disks
2. You can configure the system using the webinterface. You can reach the webinterface via the URL: http://<yourSystemsIP>/

In general working with the system shall be done using the webinterface, but it can be necessary to setup the basic IP-configuration via the command line so that the system will be assessable in your LAN.

For all further configuration steps I recommend to read through the wiki and tutorials available on freenas.org => http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page

In any case of question leave my a comment or send me a mail.

And here is the counter to the next release: 12.1

Maybe I will post a full review, some hints and trick about the table later on.

This part explains how I installed the FreeNAS operating system on my HP ProLiant MicroServer and configured it. In case you are questioning yourself how to install the OS before having the device assembled you really should continue to read…. …. maybe a hint, we are going to put the OS on the usb stick

Index

Instead of simply writing one big blog entry I decided to split up my report into multiple parts:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Components
• Part 3: Software Installation
• Part 4: Assembly & Configuration

Getting FreeNAS

You can get FreeNAS very easy from the Website of the FreeNAS project. Simply go there and look for “Download”. I decided to use the AM64-Version of FreeNAS because the AMD Neo II N36L does offer AMD64 support and therefore I did not see any argument why not to use it. To install FreeNAS on an USB-Stick the best is to download the “xxxx.Full_Install.xz”.

Installing FreeNAS on an USB-Stick

After getting to know how it is very easy to install FreeNAS on an USB-Stick to boot it from there.
To be able to write this image on a USB-Stick you maybe needs some additional software in case you do not work under Linux. How to write the operating system on the USB-Stick is described at the online documentation of FreeNAS including how to do this by using Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Therefore please check out this link to find out more: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Installing_from_the_Image
I do use Linux (openSuSE) on my workstation therefore I went with “dd” to write the image on my 8 GB trancend USB-Stick as you can see in the screenshot.

After it is done writing the image to the USB-Stick more or less the whole installation is done and we can put it to the parts we do need to put into our MicroServer.

Continue to read at: Part 4: Assembly & Configuration

Building a NAS or home server based on the Hewlett-Packard ProLiant MicroServer N36L is quite easy. Only a small amount of additional hardware is required to assemble a system with very impressive features and performance. In this small blog post I do explain which components I decided to use in my system and which benefits I hope to gain by using them.

Index

Instead of simply writing one big blog entry I decided to split up my report into multiple parts:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Components
• Part 3: Software Installation
• Part 4: Assembly & Configuration

Minimum Hardware required

Basically by buying the MicroServer you are ready to go. The system comes with all hardware you need to run a small server. But I think this would not be worth this device! Therefore decide on your own which additional hardware you want to purchase at least a pair of good and big hard disk should be added to the device!

Hard Disks

I got three 2 TB Western Digital hard disks to put into my MicroServer. I decided to go for the Green Caviar with 64MB Cache and 5400rpm. I do not need server class disks because I do plan to power down the system when it is absolutely not needed. In case I am not at home and I do need some data from the device I plan to power on by using the remote management function offered by iLO.
Back to the WD disks. They do offer a low noise profile and an acceptable performance because of the density of the disks.

RAM

I am not planning to upgrade from 1 GB RAM which was included in the package to a higher value. I checked the system requirements of FreeNAS and I think for my purpose 1 GB is pretty enough especially when comparing to some other NAS boxes with much slower processors. But in case of doing heavy raid stuff and running a lot of servers on the box you should insert more RAM.

Integrated Lights-Out – iLO

In my opinion the coolest feature you can get for this server. iLO is the remote management card by HP. By using this card you will get access to the server even when it is set to power off. Via this card you can power-on/ -off, hard reset the server, have a look on the VGA-Out (even BIOS) and install a new OS via a remote virtual DVD drive.

FreeNAS

Because I want to get the system running without having to start a long installation and configuration procedure I decided to give FreeNAS a try. FreeNAS is a free and open source operating system based on FreeBSD which is optimized for providing NAS services. A special features comes to the support of ZFS, the Zeta File System, which is fully suported including Raid-Z etc. To find out more check the FreeNAS Website and the Wikipedia article about ZFS.

USB-Stick

The USB-Stick is used to store the FreeNAS Installation on it. By using a USB-Stick there is not need to install FreeNAS on any of the hard disks and you can even benefit a little bit of the fast read access of flash storage.
For my configuration I decided to use a 8 GB stick from transcend.

The next chapters is about the required software installation. To continue reading click: Part 3: Software Installation

After several weeks thinking about how to optimize my backup and storage strategy at home I decided to look for some kind of intelligent NAS solution. When thinking about my needs I was able to define a simple feature list very easily but after checking small NAS devices an their functionality or performance I was not really able to find the perfect match. To keep it short for the beginning a came to the clue that building a own NAS by choosing specific hardware components is in fact very easy and does not mean to end up with some kind of power consuming, expensive and noisy personal computer/ server with a bunch of disks in it. In case this sounds a little bit familiar to your needs than continue ready or already check out a more advance chapter of my small report of “Building as NAS for home use”.

Index

Instead of simply writing one big blog entry I decided to split up my report into multiple parts:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Components
• Part 3: Software Installation
• Part 4: Assembly & Configuration

My Requirements

At the beginning my requirements and needs where very basic. I was simply looking for some place where to store simple files and backups. When thinking a little bit longer about the topic backup the idea came into my mind that it would be nice if the NAS could execute by schedule or on demand rsync-Jobs and other backup jobs on its own during the night.In the best case the NAS should be provide it’s storage services by as many services and protocols as possible.
In addition to that I found it very handy if I could also store music and video files on it for streaming them on my TV, Tablet, Mobile or Audio devices.
A final nice to have for me came into my mind when thinking of virtualization and extending the current storage capacity of my workstation => iSCSI !! I definitively need a NAS which is offering iSCSI to attache the storage via Ethernet to my workstation or a VM on this device. But iSCSI does only makes sense when the NAS is able to deliver it with a specific speed/ performance.
To sum it up here is the list of features my NAS needs to have:

1. Needs to support executing backup jobs on its own (preferred by using rsync)
2. Offering multiple services/ protocols for accessing or using the storage: smb, ftp, sftp, iSCSI and NFS at least
3. DLNA or similar technology for media distribution
4. Enough performance to provide usable iSCSI volumes
5. Low power consumption or at least an acceptable ratio between power consumption and benefits for home usage
6. Good value!

The first contenders

When talking about contenders I will simply name some devices I was interested in and which I compared against each other. I will not go into details regarding all features, but I will give you some information why I decided not to buy one of this devices. This does not mean that this are bad devices, but for my purpose they did not fit by my personal opinion. To make it clear: I did not own any of this devices, I was just comparing information I was able to find in reviews, the vendors website or bulletin boards. In case you think a remark or conclusion I made is wrong please leave my a comment or send my a message.

IOMEGA StorCenter IX2-200

This device looked at the beginning very promising. Especially the cloud option IOMEGA offers for this device and the support of iSCSI.  As you can see I was looking at the version with two disk drives with 1TB each.

When comparing the device to the other contenders it should offer the slowest performance. Some users did report that the device is getting really hot when it is operating. I was also not able to find out if the operating system does support setting up rsync jobs (I guest that it is not possible). What is really great is the value. When I checked the device the price was around 200€ for the version with two drives and a maximum capacity of 2 TB. By the way it should be possible to exchange the pre-installed Hard Disks by IOMEGA against other disks, which is very nice in case you want to increase the disk space.

QNAP TS-219+, TS-239pro II

I checked QNAP because when looking at NAS-Charts by smallnetbuilder.com the performance was quite nice. Then I checked the features and prices. When comparing features against price against performance you will shortly find out that this devices can get quite expensive, even when looking at devices with two hard disks only.
What was also very interesting to see is how the performance increased when using a faster CPU or more advanced one. It is easily done to spend 400€ and more for a goods performing device with 2 TB storage based on these devices from QNAP. But only to make it clear the performance is much higher than the one from the IOMEGA device.
What I was also here not really sure is how much I could customize the operating system from QNAP to fit to my requirement regarding backup and rsync.

Synology DS209+, DS211+

I think it is more faire to compare Synology only with QNAP. The NAS devices of both manufacturers shall be superb and both vendors are placing there devices in the same price ranges. Maybe someone will scream now, but I do think regarding features, performance and basic functions there is no big difference between the devices from QNAP and Synology I named here.
As for QNAP I found that a Synology device could be to expensive and unflexible for me.

Going for speed

When comparing NAS by QNAP and Synology I check also different devices by one of these vendors. In most cases the performance gain of more expensive devices was retrieved by using faster processors. In the inexpensive NAS you will always find processors based on the ARM architecture with different core speed etc. At a special price range the vendors are switching on x86 processors, especially on Intel Atom 1,6 to 1,8 single as well as dual core.

My conclusion was that in case I want more speed regarding iSCSI etc. I would need a box with a x86 CPU and to stay power efficient an Atom like CPU.
At the beginning I thought I found the devices I was looking for in the HP DataValut X312 which is using a dual core Intel Atom at 1,6 GHz. But the solution has a simple and annoying vendor lock-in which shall force the user to stay with Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS2011). This was in my case not really acceptable because I need some features available under a kind of Linux, Unix or BSD only.
Only to share a good link (sorry German only) about the X312/X310 Data Vault: http://www.onderka.com/inhalt/hp-data-vault-x300-serie/. The owner of this site managed to find a work around to boot the data vault with Debian etc. (and he is also using the HP ProLiant MicroServer).

Hewlett-Packard ProLiant MicroServer N36L

That was the device I was looking for. This small server is equipped with a dual core AMD Neo II 1,3 GHz, which shall have a equal on some cases better performance than the Intel Atom D525 and also consumes only 15W TDP which means it does not require a fan!

The ProLiant MicroServers comes in a pretty small tower which has a goods build quality. It offers four slots for 3 1/2 SATA hard disks, one 5 1/4 Slot for a DVD-/ Bluray drive, streamer or even a fifth hard disk. The whole servers does only use one big fan, straight at the end of the hard disk slots, which is in my opinion silent. In addition it offers one GBit-Ethernet port, 7 USB 2.0 (4 front, 2 rear, 1 internal), one eSATA port, one VGA port and two slots for low profile PCI cards.

And now to the specials:

• First: The internal USB port is really useful in case you want to run a NAS you can install the operating system on a usb stick and boot it from there!
• Second: The second PCI slot can be equipped with an integrated Lights-Out Card (iLO) which is a remote management card. That is very useful in case you want to reinstall your NAS from remote or only want to power it on/ off from remote
• Third: The price! In Germany you can get it for around 200€ including 1 GB RAM (one dimm!) and a 250 GB hard disk.

Based on this device and the official support for Redhat Enterprise Linux this box sound incredible promising to setup a very nice NAS. Or what do you think?

In case you are interested you can continue to read about what I purchased to build up my NAS: Part 2 – Components

Only to mention in advance: It is really a performance boost to use a SSD instead of a tradition hard disk in the R630. So in case you are thinking about to replace it because of speed – Just do it, I think you want regret it. It’s really blazing fast!

Before getting to the details. I do own a Toshiba Satellite R630. The R630 is quite similar to the Portege R700/R705 as well as the Dynabook R730. So in case you own one of this devices this manual shall be applicable too.

My objectives

I was not really annoyed by the performance the laptop offered, but from time to time I wished that starting Firefox & Co you be a little bit faster. In addition and this was annoying before turning the notification off was the Toshiba software which is monitoring the HDD. Every time working with the laptop on my knees the notification popped up that the device was moving and the hard disk was sent to park position. => To make it short: I wanted to get rid of the moving parts.

In addition I had the idea to continue using the old 320GB hard disk as an external drive.

At the beginning I was thinking about tranfering my current Windows 7 installation to the new drive by making a disk image. I dropped the idea an decided to go the easy and straight way and using a fresh installation.

What do you need to do the replacement?

• A SSD: I got the 128GB version of the Crucial RealSSD C300 (SATA). The drive is a little bit different compared to the drives from OCZ etc.. First it support SATA600 already. Second compared to the most mainstream drives it is instead of being based on the SandForce controller like the most drives are (except the ones from Intel), based on a controller using a fast ARM CPU which is delivering a even better performance than the SandForce 1200: For more information you should check out this link: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/corsair-crucial-intel-ocz-ssd.html
• A screw driver: The tip needs to be for recessed heads and very thin
• Toshiba recovery media of your laptop: You can create this media by using the “Toshiba recovery media creator software” or you can order it via the Topshiba website
• External hard disk case: In case you want to continue using the old disk drive as external disk and maybe to copy you old data to the new drive.

What to know before doing the replacement?

This short manual does not describe how to get your current software and operation systems installation including all your data on the new drive. This manual is performing a new and fresh installation! You data will remain on the old hard disk and you can copy your data from the old disk to the new one later on. This does not cover any setting or installed software!!

As usual: I guarantee for nothing

Exchanging the drive

To gain access to the current hard drive you have to remove two panels/covers from the downside of the notebook. I made a picture of every step which can be found below of the enumeration.

1. Before you begin to open the case of the notebook you should power it down and remove the battery.
2. Than you can remove the first panel which is the one covering the memory banks. The panel is secured by two screws as you can see on the pictures.
3. After removing the cover of the memory bank you can see the screws which are securing the panel/cover of the hard disk bay. Remove both screws and the cover. You shall see the hard drive now.
4. Look for a transparent piece of plastic on one side of the hard disk. Grab it and by pulling at it the hard disk can be moved upwards a little bit. Lift it up until you can grab it by hand. But be careful the wire which is used to connect the drive is very thin.
5. Lift the hard disk up and disconnect it by pulling out the SATA-Plug.
6. After removing the drive connect the SSD with the SATA-Plug and push it into the hard disk bay carefully. The Crucial RealSSD should fit perfectly into the bay. At least my did.
7. Put everything together again: Simply follow steps 3 down to 1.

Reinstall Windows 7

After putting everything together again, it is time to reinstall Windows 7. As I mentioned before, I did not try to make an image of the old installation to migrate it onto the new SSD drive. Reasons for that is that I wanted to keep it simple and by the fact that a SSD is working quite different than a normal hard disk it can be necessary to adapt the filesystem. Not doing this adaptations can have negative impact on the life time and performance of the SSD. Therefore to stay away from this kind of issues I recommend to do a fresh install.

Rolling out a fresh installation is quite easy by using the recovery DVDs from Toshiba. Just put the first Recovery DVD into the DVD drive turn on your computer and press the “F12″ key while the the “Toshiba Leading Innovation” logo is displayed. A menu shall be displayed where you can select a CD symbol by using the cursor keys. Hit the “Enter” key to boot from the DVD drive.

Now you Toshiba Satellite R630 or Portegé R700 shall boot from the Recovery DVD. The last things you need to do is to follow the Recovery Assistant which will start after to boot ends on at the graphical user interface of the Recovery DVD.

Optimizing Windows 7 for SSD

Basically Windows 7 is able to work on a SSD but in the most case the configuration is not really perfect and can harm the performance a durability of the SSD. Therefore I recommend to read the short guide and follow the instruction in it to setup Windows 7 the way it should be setup when using an SSD. It basically describes which drivers shall be installed, which type of SSD to use and all different tweak option.

http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/3116/tweaktown_s_solid_state_drive_optimization_guide/index.html

Final activities

Before I start to reinstall all the applications I need on my laptop I usually get rid of all the “Bonus software” Toshiba preinstalled on the device.  In addition I do uninstall some Toshiba tools too. For example all the recovery stuff. I created the recovery media straight after the first boot after I initially received by laptop. So why shall I need to recovery tools anymore? When you decide to uninstall the recovery tools from Toshiba you should also delete the partition D: and resize drive C: to 100% space of your SSD. You can do that via the “disk drive manager of Windows”.

So far I do not know which improvements it includes, but soon I wanted to try to install openSUSE 11.4 on my Satelitte R630. Then I will see how the combination of Linux kernel 2.6.36 and the new BIOS is working out.

You can get the update from: http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innovation/download_bios.jsp?service=EU

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