Paul McCormack’s Web Site

I currently run a number of home servers for various purposes (email, web, IM, NFS, PBX, calendar, MythTV, music & DNS hosting). These are running on five different systems around the house. At times, this strikes me as excessive!

Ever since VMWare launched their free server offering, I have been wanting to consolidate the number of systems, however the hindrance was always the amount of RAM that I would need to purchase to make the host run properly.

Recently, I have been thinking about the cost of electricity vs the cost of the additional RAM and I started to do some calculations. We get our electricity from Energy Australia on their SmartMeter tariff which varies the cost of the power during the day:

• Mon - Fri: 9 hours off-peak, 9 hours shoulder, 6 hours peak
• Weekend: 9 hours off-peak, 25 hours shoulder

The rates for these three tariffs are currently (per kWh):

• 8.14c off-peak
• 14.08c shoulder
• 35.64c peak (pricey)

A quick calculation works out the weekly hours as 63 off-peak, 75 shoulder and 30 peak which costs $26.38 per kW.

One of my servers (mail & NFS) is a Dell SC420 which uses about 160W when idle according to this report.

This means that one of my systems costs me $220 a year to run. That is a lot more than I thought!

I think that I can virtualise my Dell GX150 (Asterisk VOIP PBX server) and HP/Compaq EVO D510 SFF (web & IM) without too much drama. These boxes are smaller than the SC420 and the environmental reports for these are not available, but I reckon that there is a saving of $300 a year to be made by switching them off.

I have just purchased 2Gb RAM for the SC420 so that I can install and run VirtualBox without any performance problems. This will increase the current memory footprint five-fold and will easily swallow the other two servers memory requirements. Total cost for the RAM: $60.

I found a very useful article today on the MakeUseOf web site. The article goes into some detail about what you should do to safeguard your privacy when using Facebook. I have a Facebook profile, but I rarely use it, preferring to control the information that I release through this web site instead. I can control every aspect of this site and I trust myself a great deal more than I trust Facebook!

Click here to view the article. I found point 8 particularly interesting - I was unaware that applications installed by Friends have access to my profile.

Damn, those folks at Google Street View are fast! Less than 2 hours after I found and published a photo of their drivers nose hair, they have removed the image (see link in previous post). Luckily, I have a screen shot of the original. Is that breaching privacy laws?!?

Click on the picture on the left to view the full screen shot. I’ve had to reduce the quality of the image as my bandwidth is getting hammered since being linked from the Sydney Morning Herald web site.

Google Street View has just been launched in Australia.  I was having a look around this morning for interesting views and I found this when looking our our favourite Fish and Chips restaurant at Patonga.

Looks like the driver / photographer forgot to disable the camera before he climbed onto the car to fiddle with it!  I wonder if he has any concerns about privacy!

Update: Google have removed the image from Google Street View, but I have uploaded it in another post here.

I use Firefox as my browser of choice for all of the usual reasons - security, stability, extendibility …

I recently had a problem with one of my favourite add-ons after I deleted and recreated my profile.  Foxmarks is a great utility that allows you to synchronise your bookmarks across multiple Firefox installations (study, laptop, work etc).

I use Foxmarks to sync with my WebDAV server over HTTPS.  The problem was that when I deleted my profile and tried to set up Foxmarks, I was getting “Unknown Error 8179″ when I tried to sync.  Google wasn’t helping either (hence I thought that I should post something).

The error was caused because I was using self-signed SSL certificates and I had not yet told Firefox about my own Certificate Authority.  As soon as I downloaded my CA file and set it to trusted, everything worked again.

Hope this helps you.