This server is primarily meant for data storage (and hasn't been used for anything else up till now). I would like to host a site on it eventually, but my upload speed isn't up to par. The box runs Arch Linux too - what else did you expect ;-)? This setup has an encrypted data partition, which, thanks to a little hacking of the encrypt hook, automounts on boot if the external keyfile is present. The space is divided as follows: 1 GB as a RAID 1 for the OS itself, another 1 GB (of the third HD) is used for /var; the rest of the space (all three disks) is used for the data partition, in a RAID 5. The box is running a custom kernel, of course - partially out of necessity (I integrate loop-AES into the kernel package I build, otherwise I'd have to rebuild it against every new kernel) and partially because I just like to tinker.

Hardware specifications

• Antec P180 case (lots of space, silent as a whisper)
• AMD Athlon64 X2 5050e (45W TDP)
• Zalman CNPS9500 AM2
• 2 GB DDR2 SD-RAM
• Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H motherboard (AMD/ATi 780G based)
• Asus Xonar Essence STX
• Western Digital Green Power 2 (S-ATA, 3,5", 1 TB, 5400 RPM)
• Samsung Spinpoint EcoGreen F3EG HD203WI (S-ATA, 3,5", 2 TB, 5400 RPM)

Setup

AMD Athlon64 X2 5050e
To use the Cool 'n' Quiet capabilities of this CPU you need to load the powernow_k8 module, and install cpufreqd, which will pull in cpufreq-utils along with it. Set up both utilities, and add cpufreqd as a daemon. If your motherboards supports the CPU revision (a BIOS upgrade may be needed) it will run at a lower voltage by default. I have installed phc-k8 to see how far I can undervolt the CPU but haven't had the time to really get into that so far.

Asus Xonar Essence STX
Needs ALSA 0.1.20 or higher. Keep in mind it doesn't only need the snd-oxygen driver (for the C-Media 8788 chip the card is built around) but also the snd-virtuoso driver that enables support for Asus' recent line of cards based on this chip (D1, DX, D2, DX2, Essence STX, etc.). You might also need kernel 2.6.30 or higher (depending on whether ALSA has its sound card drivers integrated into the kernel or not).

Western Digital Green Power 2
Western Digital put out multiple versions of its Green Power line - you can get drives running at 5400 RPM (WD10EACS, like I have) and 7200 RPM (model WD10EADS, I believe). Some people have been experiencing problems with some of their Green Power 2 models on Linux with the "Intellipark" feature. This technology parks the seeker when idle, and has a much lower time out than the kernel flush timer (which is 30 seconds by default). This causes the seeker to be parked like twice a minute, which will cause the drive to exceed it's specified 300'000 parks in less than a year. Only some models are affected (and luckily mine isn't one of them). Western Digital has purportedly stated that they do not support customers using their disks on Linux (!). I can understand that if you're Creative and can't even manage to pull together decent Windows drivers for your products and have to trick people into buying your stuff through marketing (let's call it what it is). A hard disk however is a basic part of every computer system - unlike (pseudo?) high end sound cards. Anyway: there should be a firmware update out for the affected devices by this time.

ATi HD3200 HDMI Audio
The HDMI audio on the onboard graphics card is properly recognised by ALSA (at least from 0.1.18 on). I haven't configured nor used it - this box mainly acts as a fileserver, MPD server, and as a backend to my AppleTV to which it streams video. While at a time I had plans for it as a HTPC, it's more of a storage, streaming and torrent server.

Miscellaneous
Most, if not all, of the other stuff works out of the box, so there's very little to say here. No suspend to RAM or disk, front USB gets enabled by default, so... Move along!

lspci output
00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (int gfx)
00:04.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 0)
00:0a.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 5)
00:11.0 SATA controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
00:12.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:12.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700 USB OHCI1 Controller
00:12.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700 USB OHCI1 Controller
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 3a)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 IDE Controller
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 LPC host controller
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge
00:14.5 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI2 Controller
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
01:05.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RS780 Azalia controller
02:00.0 PCI bridge: PLX Technology, Inc. PEX8112 x1 Lane PCI Express-to-PCI Bridge (rev aa)
03:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CMI8788 [Oxygen HD Audio]
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)
05:0e.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link

lsusb output
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Nothing interesting on USB, as you can see ;-).

Last updated July 8th, 2010