Marvell

A little over a year ago I purchased a SheevaPlug Development Kit to replace my aging server with something a bit more eco-friendly. Looking back, that didn't turn out to be as easy as I thought.

The main services that I was running of the plug (DNS,DHCP,NTP,Proxy) have been working just fine. Of course the problems were the little things. Irssi failed to run and for some reason the SD card that I was using would become unaccessible every ~45 days so I had to rethink my storage strategy.
As experimenting with the SD card took a lot of time as I needed to wait for over a month between every attempt, my old server still hasn't been removed. As it turns out, that wasn't such a bad thing.

Then came the day I wanted to upgrade the plug to the new Ubuntu release to see if that would resolve the software issues. That turns out to be impossible as Ubuntu changed the supported ARM versions so the only thing that can run on the plug is Jaunty (9.04) which will stop receiving updates very soon. So I'll have to take the plug offline and re-install using Debian.

This week however, the plug took itself offline, as the power supply had blown up:

(image taken from the forums as I didn't have a camera nearby, but mine looks exactly the same)

As it turns out, this is a very common problem. The sheevaplug forums are filled with pictures like this. The plug will either not power on at all, or the power led will just flash once every second. So many people have encountered this problem that the now have begun selling replacement power supplies. As mine was purchased from the US, which doesn't have the the EU 2yr warranty, I'll have to get a replacement PSU or construct one myself.

So now all services have been restarted on the old server (good old Dual P2, from back in the days when hardware was still reliable) and once I have the plug hooked up to a new power supply, I'll reinstall it using Debian and hopefully be able to move everything over to it. To be on the safe side, I might equip it with some speedholes to cool it down.

A few months ago, I decided to purchase a SheevaPlug Development Kit to replace my previous home server which was an old Dell workstation. The main reason to replace the old machine was power usage, for a machine that is sitting idle most of the time, it costs a lot of money to run.
All I needed was a device on which I could run linux to run some typical core network services (DNS, DHCP, NTP) as well a some extras like my internal mail server and proxy. With a power consumption of only a few Watts, the SheevaPlug was ideal for this purpose. Its a pretty small device with the following specifications:

Specifications

• 1.2GHz Marvell Kirkwood 6281 CPU
• 512MB DDR2 400MHz RAM
• 512MB NAND Flash
• Gigabit Ethernet
• USB 2.0 Host
• SDIO interface for SDHC cards
• Serial port

Installation

The SheevaPlug is shipped with Ubuntu 9.04 “jaunty” installed. The standard software image does have some issues, so the first thing I did was upgrad to the latest version using the SheevaPlug installer 1.0. This involved attaching the serial console to a PC and running a script which loaded the new software from an USB stick. This wasn't very difficult, but not exactly something a novice should attempt either. The only issue I ran into was that the USB stick used to perform the upgrade couldn't have any partitions on it. So the stick had to be wiped and formatted as one big FAT32 partition (mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdX).

After the upgrade was completed, the device was ready to be configured just like any other debian-like linux machine.
Because the size of the internal flash is limited, I installed a 4GB SDHC card to mount the directories that are most likely to fill up the storage.

The next issue I ran into was that after logging in via SSH, the device complained about missing nl_BE locales. Because those are not available on the plug and I didn't really need them, I set the locale to en_US by creating /etc/default/locale with the following contents:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8" 
LANGUAGE="en_US.UTF-8:en"

Software

I installed the following software packages, which are working without issues:

ntp

Internal primary NTP server for use by all clients. Obtains the current time from several external clock sources

bind9

Internal primary DNS server. Hosts the internal DNS zone and accepts DDNS updates from the DHCP server.

dhcp3-server

Internal DHCP server. Assigns IP addresses to clients and updates the DNS records.

squid3

Proxy server. I don't really need caching, but to access some websites, I need to use an external proxy server. Instead of having to change the client settings every time, this proxy server simply redirects requests for some websites to different upstream proxy servers

postfix

Mail relay. All outbound email needs to pass via this server, again to make it easier to switch to different upstream ISPs and to detect abuse in case a clients gets infected by a virus.

dovecot

Internal IMAP server. This hosts the users mailboxes. Email is retrieved from the ISPs using fetchmail and then stored on this server so that it can be accessed from any computer in the house.

Experience

The device is working pretty well. Other than a small issue with the SD card, everything has been running stable for a few months now. One of the major drawbacks at the time is the price. Its only 99USD, with shipping costs that adds up to a little over 100EUR plus an additional 30EUR VAT and fees.

For others interested in purchasing this device in Europe, there now is a company selling them from the UK so you can avoid the additional fees, NewIT. I don't have any experience with them the offers look pretty nice. They can even sell different models, so you won't have to perform the initial upgrade yourself. If anyone has experience with them, good or bad, let me know. I'll probably get another one just to experiment with.