All-in-one homeserver, advisable?
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Are those plugged directly into the computer? Could you try it with a powered usb hub?
(running low on ideas)
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Are those plugged directly into the computer? Could you try it with a powered usb hub?
(running low on ideas)
Don't have access to one right now. And I don't think that could be the problem (the dongle LED wouldn't be ON if it was powered down, right?) Anyway, I tried all the resources I found on setting the autosuspend mode off, nothing has worked so far. I checked the uptime the last time it failed, and that was about 16 minutes. The problem I am facing is similar to https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=45157.0
The dongle disconnects after sometime and it becomes impossible to reconnect it later (even removing and reinserting doesn't work.) When this happens, one of the PHP processes starts taking 40% CPU usage and must be killed manually for the system to work. It's just unreliable from that point onwards; I NEED to restart it to make the mobile internet or anything related to pfsense work.At the moment, I am using pfsense (64 bit) on VMware Workstation on a Windows 8.1 host and everything seems to be working perfectly. The link has been up for 40ish minutes and hasn't failed. I can remove the dongle as I wish, disconnect and reconnect without reboots.
Could it just be that the dongle doesn't work well with 32 bit pfsense? Maybe I should test 32 bit pfsense on VMware or perhaps just give up on this :/ -
It could be that the port just isn't pushing enough power on its on. I've experienced that many times with usb devices.
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I would suspect some issue with the USB pass through to the VM. It's probably timing out somewhere. Maybe to save resources it only represents the USB device when it sees call to it. There could be many reasons. The USB dongle and pfSense really aren't designed/tested to operate in this way so you may be up against a insolvable issue.
Steve
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I fixed the problem by disabling ACPI and APM but that still didn't allow me to disconnect and reconnect the dongles. Frustrated from that and the extraordinarily high idle load values (>1 on Ubuntu and 0.7 in pfsense,) I decided not to go ahead with this. Moreover my temperatures seemed to be monotonically increasing in an air conditioned room.
I am getting better resource utilization under VMware workstation (it idles at 1% usage.) For now this works.As far as the netbook is concerned. I just cannot run the firewall and server on it simultaneously if I want isolation. Perhaps a chrooted environment / jail was my best option; I don't have the patience to deal with that for now. Maybe I should have just stuck with not trying to isolate it anyway. The netbook might be repurposed as a media server / HTPC later.
Note: I tried to get ESXi 3.5 to work on it (last version that supported 32 bit machines) but it threw a PSOD before I could install it.
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Well - I didn't see that coming. (-;
I'd try to find a abuse celeron dual core laptop with some missing keys cracked screen, bad battery etc that is useless to the unimaginative person who owns it… Grab it and install Your things there. Actually - There are probably i7 laptops like this by now that people will almost pay you to take off their hands.
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Well - I didn't see that coming. (-;
I'd try to find a abuse celeron dual core laptop with some missing keys cracked screen, bad battery etc that is useless to the unimaginative person who owns it… Grab it and install Your things there. Actually - There are probably i7 laptops like this by now that people will almost pay you to take off their hands.
Hard to find them online :S I found dual core servers for around 200 USD on ebay. I have a laptop sitting around with a 32 processor and Vt-x and a C2D E4300 desktop as alternatives.
I might keep the netbook as a dedicated pfsense firewall. The other servers can reside in the workstation, they don't really need high availability. If I could somehow disable the LEDs in fans and power / HDD LEDs, I might be able to sleep in the same room! The power footprint may not be as high as I am imagining, I should really just measure it.
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Using my workstation as a router/firewall was becoming cumbersome, with all those lights and stuff. I ended up moving it back to my netbook, only this time I used jails. Apparently the main features of jails are performance and security: http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/jails so it seemed like the perfect choice for me.
Everything works perfectly now. My load values are actually lower than 1.5 now! And temperatures actually decrease when the machine is idle and/or air conditioned.
I would've liked to put the jails in a DMZ but that just can't be done I guess. There is no way to add NICs and the VLAN feature on my ADSL router seems buggy. I really should get some new networking hardware.
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Interesting. So what are you running in the jails and what is hosting, FreeBSD?
Steve
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Interesting. So what are you running in the jails and what is hosting, FreeBSD?
Steve
Host is pfsense and the jails run FreeBSD. I don't think an alternate setup is possible. I believe pfsense can't run in a jail, and jails cant run anything but FreeBSD.
I have a guest with asterisk, and another with apache/transmission/samba.
