Shinra

Shinra is the second collectively-owned student server on campus, as well as the third server designed and built by Niko Kern. In contrast to the location of ornia and Pitus, Shinra makes its home in the cluster room in Adele Simmons Hall. Shinra, as with Pitus, was funded by the Student Activities Fee through Financial Committee with the aid of Jose Fuentes. Shinra was built in Greenwich Mod 24 Room B, and the total price of the components was just shy of $5,000 by a few dollars.

Purpose
Shinra is designed to be a backup server for Hampedia, so that all articles, uploaded files, and even the operating system's configuration which powers the wiki on the backend can be saved to Shinra every night automatically. Before Shinra was created, Niko was manually taking snapshots of the MySQL database of Hampedia (which contains all article content) and recursive copies of the mediawiki installation directory (to preserve installed extensions and configurations) and placing them on ornia. Likewise, ornia's backups were being made to Pitus' RAID-6 array so that if one machine were to fail, it might be restored by the contents of the other. With the hardware available to Niko, it made sense to back up the servers in this way, especially since the secondary network cards on both ornia and Pitus were connected directly to each other via a gigabit connection over a single crossover Ethernet cable.

This scenario had several glaring limitations, however. Firstly, as the most important backup to be made, Hampedia's backup space was being limited to the storage in ornia which, as the oldest of the servers built by Niko, had only 3.5TB of space and was rapidly running out of room. Secondly, and perhaps most glaringly, the backups being performed were not off-site. Because both ornia and Pitus are located right next to one another in the same room in the Johnson Library Center, some sort of physical disaster (natural or otherwise) would leave both machines vulnerable to similar harmful circumstances. As such, a need for a backup solution which could be automated and in another physical location entirely developed. Shinra was, from its conception, intended to be located on the other side of campus in ASH, instead of the Library. All required backups and configurations could be made after Shinra's creation over the local area network at Hampshire.

Hardware

 * Mainboard: 1 x TYAN n3600r (S2912G2NR-E) (coreboot ready)
 * CPU: 2 x AMD Opteron 2380 Quad-Core, 2.5GHz per core, 2MB L2 cache, 6MB L3 cache, 1GHz FSB, 95 Watt TDP
 * RAM: 4 x Kingston 4GB DDR2-800 PC2-6400 Registered ECC
 * RAID card: 1 x Adaptec 31205 (2252400-R) PCI-Express 12-port SAS/SATA RAID Controller Card
 * SATA Hard Disk Drives: 10 x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS SATA-II 32MB Disk buffer (RAID-6 array)
 * SAS Hard Disk Drives: 2 x 147GB Fujitsu MBA3300 (MBA3147RC) SAS at 15,000 RPM, 16MB Disk buffer (RAID-1 array)
 * Power Supply Unit: 1 x SeaSonic M12D SS-750, 750 Watt EPS12V, Energy Efficient 80 PLUS SILVER Certification
 * Heatsink/Fan: 2 x Dynatron A5MG CPU Coolers with 4.1" mounting pitch
 * Chassis: 1 x Norco 4U EATX Rackmount Server Case RPC-4020 with 20x Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS Drive Bays

Software
Shinra, much like Pitus and ornia before it, is designed to only run 100% Free/Libre Software as defined by the Free Software Foundation. During initialisation, Shinra loads the boot loader GNU GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader) from the Fujitsi brand Serial Attached SCSI disks' Mast Boot Record(s). The boot loader then loads the virtualisation software, called Xen. Xen is run before any operating system is loaded, so that a key piece of virtualisation technology called the hypervisor can watch over all installed operating systems. The hypervisor then loads the host operating system, or Xen domain 0, which on Shinra is presently the Debian distribution of GNU+Linux, version Lenny or 5.0. This domain 0 operating system is a very minimalistic installation of Debian whose singular purpose is to be a connection between the Xen hypervisor and the operating systems which actually matter: the guests, or Xen domain Us.

Shinra is but one guest OS installation, only one Xen domain U of potentially many. The machine therefore always runs at least two operating systems at once: the initial bootup of the host OS domain 0 which in turn automatically boots the specified guest domain Us, including Shinra. Each operating system installation can be backed up individually, given as much storage space as necessary, and can be migrated from one physical machine to another without being rebooted. Although the CPUs in Shinra allow for the hardware virtualisation of unmodified guest operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS X, there is no need nor desire to run any proprietary software so it is being specifically avoided. Shinra will always run Freely licensed software now, and forever.

Choice of Hardware
Shinra was created specifically to run no proprietary, non-free software from the ground up, which includes device drivers to enable hardware to communicate with the installed operating systems. The components were chosen specifically to financially support hardware manufacturers which have shown a notable movements to make their hardware work with Free/Open Source software and freely licensed drivers in the operating system GNU+Linux. For example, the former Software Development Manager at TYAN added coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS) support to this motherboard so that people may choose to liberate the firmware on their motherboards by flashing the BIOS EEPROM chip and replacing it with an improved GPL-licensed alternative: coreboot. The manufacturer of the CPUs is AMD who was chosen instead of Intel Corporation because AMD released graphics processing unit documentation to the world so that Free Software drivers may be produced for all ATI-brand video cards with full 3-D acceleration. Intel however has been shown to be consistently stubborn in the process of making their wireless networking cards work with Freely licensed drivers and firmware. An Adaptec employee was contacted prior to the purchase of the RAID card in Shinra to confirm that Freely licensed drivers for their hardware accelerated RAID adapter cards were available in the Linux kernel.

Choice of Software
Pitus runs only 100% Free Software, which means software which has been released under a license approved by the Free Software Foundation. It is true and always will be that Hampedia is constructed of only Free Software on a system with a Free Software operating system, to ensure the security and longevity of the project.

The Xen hypervisor was chosen because it is an enterprise-level virtualisation solution which allows Shinra to have a GPL-licensed hypervisor under which multiple operating systems can run concurrently.

GNU+Linux was chosen for Shinra's operating systems because it offers the most powerful, flexible, modern server operating system with the additional benefit of being comprised of mostly GPL-licensed software.