Take one cheap Japanese plastic fan, snap the front off, trim the blades to fit the duct, zip tie the duct to the fan and walla forced air duct for a small server room.

This idea at first didn’t do much. I had the fan on the floor with the ducting blowing out the bottom of the door. Seemed to just take the cool air from the floor of the server room and blow it around with the cool air of the hallway and let it drift back in. The room hung out at around 103* with that setup (video below).

After that setup I moved the fan to the top shelf of the computer rack, stretched the duct out to match the door, cut a hole, trimmed one of Emily’s food bowls to fit in the door and it all slides together now when you shut the door. The best thing is that it dropped the temp from 103* to 86* in about 30 minutes.

Still debating some more ideas, but for now; this seems to be keeping up with the 12 odd computers running in there (most are just doing SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, Cosmos@Home and MilkyWay@Home). I’m also putting bugs in Emily’s ears to let me purchase some “real” servers and get rid of these old ones. Then again, I really like using old computers so who knows .. what ever ..

Take care and check back again,
Justin

I have had Tomato Linux on my Linksys WRT54GL for about 6 months now. At first I had delusions of making that wireless router the do everything box in my rack; that didn’t work so well. (See my network “work” here).

Anyhow, I decided to run my “Vonage Linksys” router as the central point with the Tomato Linksys WRT54GL as the wireless tool and a simple HUB dishing out the splitting duties.

Well, last night I decided to drag out my old Linksys WRT54G v6 with DD-WRT installed (only the micro version) and use “that” as my wireless router, my Tomato powered Linksys as my do it all “but” wireless router/firewall.

I say all this because while upgrading my firmware from Tomato 1.21 to Tomato 1.23 I found this video of a couple of tech guys actually installing Tomato on their Linksys router. Needless to say, upgrading the firmware gives your little Linksys a TON more power to do much more than Linksys ever wanted you to do.

Here’s the video, and I hope you too jump out there get a WRT54GL (The “L” is for Linux) and dump some aftermarket application on there.

K, so I’ve reached the point that updating all the applications across my ever growing little network has become a seriously tedious process. Some one in some forum somewhere mentioned using ssh-keygen to eliminate the need for the continuous password process when using ssh. Here’s how I handled that (took me long enough, I’ve been using ssh (PuTTy in MS) for ever).

First you’ll need to generate your ssh key. It looks like this all together (I’ll splice in the items I included). Make sure you are in your ~ directory. Might even be easier if you move to your users .ssh directory (like this: $ cd ~/.ssh). That way you’ll automatically drop these keys in your user’s .ssh directory. I made the items I entered into terminal red for ease of understanding.

justin@Ares:~/.ssh$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/justin/.ssh/id_dsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): <enter>
Enter same passphrase again: <enter>
Your identification has been saved in /home/justin/.ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/justin/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
fb:xx:fd:xx:f7:xx:a6:xx:74:xx:7e:xx:6d:xx:86:xx justin@Ares
The key’s randomart image is:
“my little secret”

That created a few things for us. The only one we’re going to need to man handle (sorry ladys, it’s a figure of speech). is the “id_dsa.pub file. This file will need copied to the machines you want to ssh into. It will be saved in each machines ~/.ssh directory as authorized_keys2 (you can ssh into that machine and run ls -l ~/.ssh to check if it’s there.

I did a little rsync tutorial a few months ago, and this is how I moved the new key to each of my networks computers. EVEN those where I don’t have the same login-name. Here is how I moved them around to all the machines (the IP addresses are my own, you’ll have to know your own to make it work for you).

$ ssh -avz ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub thatuser@192.168.0.69:/home/thatuser/.ssh/authorized_keys2

You will be asked for that user’s password and rsync will plop that dawg in their .ssh directory. So the next time you loginto that machine as “that” user ssh will let you right in and drop you in that users ~/ directory.

To button all this up run a little chmod action on these new files (sudo chmod -v 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2) to keep things on the down low and press on with your ssh ass.

Here’s a command I can now run via ssh with only the sudo password needed for the command.

$ ssh -X 192.168.0.69 ‘conky -a top_left’

Enjoy,

Justin