Home NAS Expansion – Continued

In previous articles, I investigated using ZFS to build a home NAS, which is very simple and extremely effective.

But in this article, I discussed expanding that NAS by changing out disks one by one. While it’s easy to change the disks out and increase the size of your zpool, it doesn’t quite work because as your filesystem was created as raidz1, it will not increase in size.

That means that when you want to increase the size of your NAS down the track, you either have to copy all the files from your NAS on to an external device, then delete and recreate your zfs filesystem, or consider a different way of building the NAS in the first place.

So today I’m going to look at building a NAS with the same functionality as before, but with the ability for the disks to be easily changed out down the track to easily increase the size of your home storage system.

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This is why it’s worth learning about advertising

A lot of people are asking what Apple’s target market is, and how they’re going to sell this iPad. These people are all stupid. Apple has told us exactly how they’re going to sell it.

From Apple.com:

Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.

Bam! That’s their selling point! Somebody gets paid lots of money to write that sentence, and they earn it all, because that sentence will sell several billion of these things.

Geeks are getting pissed off because this isn’t a real computer/doesn’t run OS X/doesn’t have XYZ/is a glorified iPod touch. This is because geeks know nothing about advertising, which is another way of saying they don’t know how people work. Admen get paid to understand the entire planet and to synthesize it all into a sentence. So when you look at Apple’s advertising, you know that this isn’t just empty speech. Apple has figured out what the entire world wants and it is magic and revolution. That’s how they’re selling it. They figure the only people who won’t want an iPad are people who don’t like magic.

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All moved in (again)

A little while ago I decided to move my blog from my home linux server to a Rackspace cloud server so that my frequent meddling with my home server wouldn’t keep bringing my site down.

But today I decided that the easy-peasiest way for me to host this site would be to go full circle and move it back to wordpress.com with a custom domain.

For anyone who’s considering moving a self-hosted wordpress blog back to wordpress.com, the process is pretty simple.

Create a new blog on wordpress.com, then use the import/export functionality to dump all the stories out of your old blog and import them into the new one. It’ll even bring across the pictures you uploaded and store them in your new storage space.

Then once you’ve got it looking right, click “Upgrades” and select to map your domain. You’ll need to have access to the DNS settings of your domain so you can point the nameservers to wordpress.com, but it’s a relatively simple process and there’s a stack of howtos available.

Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with my Wiki.

Virtualbox versus VMWare Workstation

As an IT guy, I need to be using Windows for my day to day desktop environment as there are many vendor specific applications I need to run on a day to day basis which simply aren’t available on unix variants. However, that doesn’t stop me from wanting to run Linux applications when I’m on the road, or needing to quickly build a server to test something out.

At the moment when I want to get in to the sandbox, I’m using VMWare Workstation. I’ve used it for quite a while, and am very comfortable with it. But there are other virtualisation platforms out there, so I thought it was only fair that I have a look at the other options which are available. So today we’ll be comparing VMWare Workstation with Sun Microsystems’ virtualisation client, Virtualbox.

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Linux… On a Memory Key?

Yes, you heard right, Linux fans. But it’s not as simple as all that.

Today I’m going to be playing around with the new version of ACE management server from VMWare. As you probably know, they’re all for running normal operating systems in completely abnormal ways, and ACE lets us do even more abnormal things – like installing a virtual machine which can run entirely from a memory key, while avoiding touching the host operating system at all.

Of course, you don’t necessarily need to use Linux for this. In fact, any operating system which is supported by VMWare can run in this manner. So if you’d rather run Windows or OpenSolaris, go right ahead. The principle is exactly the same.

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Browsing irrationale from a mobile? Good news!

If you view irrationale on a iPhone, storm, droid or similar, then our new mobile skin should make things much more comfortable for you.

Enjoy!

X11 forwarding over SSH

Building a Linux server is a fairly simple affair. If you’re anything like me, you had some old hardware lying around which you shoved into a cheap case, stuck a copy of Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Whatever on it, and bob’s your uncle.

But once it’s up and running, should you dedicate a monitor/keyboard/mouse to a computer you barely use? Or is there another option?

Thankfully, one thing Linux has in spades is Options.

Today I’m going to deal with X11 forwarding over SSH. As you may know, SSH is one of the primary ways of connecting in to your Linux server, but it’s normally used for terminal commands – something some people aren’t all that comfortable with.

X11 forwarding over SSH allows the display of any programs you’d normally run from within a Gnome or KDE session to be displayed remotely, with only a few steps to make it possible.

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Snow Leopard on Non-Apple Hardware

Building a hackintosh, an Apple computer which uses off-the-shelf hardware, can be a pretty daunting task. In the past I’ve struggled with confusing walk-throughs, been frustrated with shitty custom builds of OSX and generally thrown in the towel after about 4 hours of abject failure.

But all that changed when I found this article.

All you’ll need is something reasonably modern – in my case it was the following hardware:

  • Gigabyte X48-DS4 Motherboard
  • Intel Core 2 Duo 3.2GHz
  • 4Gb of DDR2-800 RAM
  • Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1Tb

I also didn’t have a large enough USB memory stick, so instead I used an 80Gb 2.5″ hard disk and an IDE to USB adaptor. If your motherboard is able to boot from a USB key, it should be able to boot from one of these too.

Following the guide is relatively easy, but there is one step which was missed (at least in my case), and that’s the installation of Chameleon on your hard disk once you’ve finished the install. Unless you want to keep your USB key permanently plugged in to your system, I’d suggest you go through the boot installer steps again once you’ve finished and use the ID of your main hard disk.

Enjoy!

Dr. StrangeRAID, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love ZFS

So now that we’ve chosen to go with Solaris and use NFS for our filesystem, let’s consider how we’re going to use ZFS to best suit our needs.

So let’s say that I have four 1Tb disks lying around which I want to thow into my new file server. At some point in the future, I’d like to upgrade my capacity by replacing one or all of the disks with larger ones (say, 2Tb).

How do we go about it?

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Upgrading OpenSolaris to the latest Dev version

At the time of writing, the release buid version of OpenSolaris is 111b, and the latest dev build is 124.

To upgrade, open a terminal and run the following commands:

user@opensolaris:~$ pfexec su -
root@opensolaris:~# pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev opensolaris.org
root@opensolaris:~# pkg image-update