Deneb was the name of my small home server for AFS and SMB file sharing, SVN repository, apache http and more. During my holidays in Sweden, the machine has stopped working.
Deneb was born in march 2007. Its brain was based on a 1.2 GHz CPU from VIA, on a small mainboard (VIA EPIA EN12000EG Mini-ITX). There was 1 GByte of RAM and a DVD writer in the machine. It permanently consumed about 30 watts during its lifetime.
In the beginning, it had been running FreeBSD, and a bit more than a year ago, I had switched to debian linux after mixing up a couple of shared libraries in the FreeBSD installation. Most of my personal files were stored on Deneb’s harddisk, made available by an AFP and an SMB server, plus an SVN server for the files under version control. An automatic daily backup script was in place to make sure the data wouldn’t get lost.
The last sign of life that I discovered on Deneb’s harddisk was a snapshot from the web cam from 02.07.2011, about 5 a.m. The web cam was set up to take a picture out of a window in the flat where I live every ten or so minutes. The system log showed no signs of an emerging problem.
After returning back from holidays, I noticed that the harddisk activity led was permanently on. Switching Deneb off and on didn’t have any effect, so I decided to open the case to see what was the problem:
Obviously, the electrolytic capacitors had become a little bit too hot - those near the heat sink showed some bulging.
I tried to “rescue” Deneb with some replacement capacitors that I had ordered in ebay, but the holes of the capacitor pins are so small that I couldn’t solder the new capacitors to the mainboard.
That was the end of Deneb.
By coincidence, Apple refreshed their Mac Mini about 3 weeks ago. Now, Algol is serving my files, with a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and 2 GBytes of RAM. I didn’t check the actual power consumption, but according to Apple, it is only about 13 watts. Here’s a picture of Algol:
Algol came with Mac OS X Lion. Things are not yet working as I want. Mounting the shared AFS volumes is unreliable. Sometimes, a “home” folder mounts instead of my “Music” folder. SMB also doesn’t work reliably. I often get “error -50” in iTunes. Hopefully they will fix the file sharing services in 10.7.1...