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Trying to consolidate servers for $$ electricity savings. I currently have 6 servers running 24/7 trying to get down to just 1. My new server is a Linux/Fedora box running MythTV for distributed whole house video/TV and Zoneminder for cctv monitoring. I've been trying to see if I could also get my CQC server to run on that machine as well.
Virtualization will not work because I want to have CQC serve my audio files for whole house sound through a PCI card and virtualized servers (like VMWare) do not allow access to the PCI cards. Other types of virtualization (like Xen) does allow access to PCI hardware but apparently has significant degredation of audio signals.
So rather than trying to get a complete Windows environment through virtualization maybe I could just run the CQC program itself on Linux through a Windows emulation program such as Wine? Has anybody out there tried to run CQC in Linux this way?
Robolo
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Another option, if everything else is on the Linux machine, is to just get a very low power consumption machine for the CQC MS. If that's all it's doing, it can be a pretty low power machine by today's standards.
Dean Roddey
Explorans limites defectum
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I am using a MSI WindPC for a CQC master server and it runs fine. It only uses 65 watts. Only modification that is really important that I found was to add a connector to power the case fan directly instead of from the motherboard. The fan needs to run at full speed all the time to prevent excessive cpu temperatures.
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The only problem with running CQC on a micro-PC is that I need it to have full height PCI slot to serve my whole house audio. I have a M-Audio Delta 410 PCI card that (I think) needs to be installed in the CQC box. Isn't that right?
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I tried running CQC under Wine in the last year ... though for the life of me I can't remember why now, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
From what I recall I couldn't get the interface viewer to successful see the server (which was running on a windows machine). It kept giving some kind of socket error, which made the exercise a bit of a non-starter. Though that was the only time I've ever played with Wine so maybe I was just doing something wrong.
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I've been "sort-of" running CQC under Linux, using VMWare Server. I too wanted to consolidate down to a single server, and I spent a weekend tinkering with it to get it to work pretty well.
My Windows VM starts and stops properly when the Linux machine boots up/shuts down and I can access the Windows "desktop" via VMWare Server's web interface. The VM is acting as my master server, and it has four serial ports available to it. It took a little hackery to get that to work, as the GUI only lets you set up two ports. I have an 8-port Moxa card that is working on my Linux install, and I was able to map 4 of those ports to the VM.
Unexpectedly, I also had a single stereo audio device working from the Windows VM to a Linux audio device. I didn't really plan to use that, so I didn't pursue it very much. Multi-channel PCI audio is not happening under VMWare, nor are any specialized devices. USB and serial do seem to work, however.