Archive for the 'deep geekery' Category

finally, my zfs server

Published on 20/8/2008 in deep geekery. 0 Comments

OK, this is for Google, as I found it so hard to find info on different boards. My hardware for my OpenSolaris install:

Asus M2N-VM HDMI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+

Rest of the hardware here.

However, that’s the motherboard that my mate said he had and it all worked. Of course, given my luck, it didn’t. He’d told me the wrong board. He had the Asus M2A-VM HDMI. So that one works. The M2N-VM HDMI doesn’t. Not totally.

The problem is with the network on the M2N-VM, and, if I’d done proper research, I would have found out. I did try this guy’s fix using some 3rd party ethernet drivers, but that didn’t work for me. So I popped out to get an Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter and switched off the onboard LAN on the M2N-VM. Worked fine.

So I’m all set up. Copied over all my media and still got around 1TB spare:

# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 906G 919G 28.0K /tank
tank/backup 62.9M 919G 62.9M /tank/backup
tank/pool 906G 919G 906G /tank/pool

# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
tank 2.72T 1.33T 1.39T 48% ONLINE -

Jay - I went with a CIFS mount as it was faster (30-40MB/s vs 20MB/s for NFS).

Name, um, inspired by Private Dancer Doris:

dusky-zfs.jpg

still geeking

Published on 9/8/2008 in deep geekery. 2 Comments

Well it should be pretty straight forward installing OpenSolaris. But it’s not. Not for me anyway.

First off, it wouldn’t display on my Apple monitor.
I plugged it into my TV and at least I could see what was going on.
I thought it had hung during the boot from the DVD, but it just took ages. Eventually booted up and installed, but it wouldn’t boot from the hard drive. Bad PBR signal was the only message. Whatever that means. Tried a few more times (each time takes an hour). No luck. I was using release 85. Couldn’t get 95, so tried 93. This time it booted. All good. Set up the zfs pool, shared it, eventually mounted it on my Mac, fiddled around with the user ids and permissions, and could eventually read and write …. very slowly. About 2 MB/s. Other people get 40 MB/s and more depending on their network. So copying all my media would take 4 days. Okkaaaaayy.

Had to figure out if it was the network - don’t think it is, as writing a file direct to the drive gets 2 MB/s. So … the SATA driver? The drives in the right mode? IRQ conflicts? Nooooo idea. I’m learning all sorts of Solaris commands, but not really getting anywhere.

Google helped a little. So dude had the same hardware and same issue. He zeroed out the drives and reinstalled and it seemed to help. So I’m trying that right now. But it takes hours to zero out 3TB of drives.

zfs

Published on 7/8/2008 in deep geekery. 4 Comments

Major geekery alert!

I have 2.1TB of hard drive space in my Mac Pro, and 1.5TB in my external Lacie drives. However, there is no redundancy built in. No RAID5 if you know what I mean. If one of those drives fails, then I’ll lose what’s on it, unless I have a backup.

I have backups of my main drive (system, user files, music, photos), via Time Machine, which has saved my ass twice already, but my other media (mainly movies and TV shows) on a specific drive would be lost if that drive failed. My 1TB Lacie drive has started making funny noises, and Firewire on the Mac is a bit dodgy I think. Or my drive is already dodgy - always unmounting and remounting.

So, I’m going to build a home fileserver. I’m just going to follow those instructions and use ZFS on OpenSolaris.

Why ZFS?

Stolen directly from the link above - mainly:

  • Simple administration
  • Ability to create large, redundant data storage pools with one command
  • Built-in data scrubbing to enable ZFS to self-heal ‘latent failures’ (bit rot etc)
  • Is designed upon the assumption that disk hardware should never be trusted, so solid checksumming, transactions are used
  • Designed to use cheap, commodity SATA disks, not expensive SAS disks
  • RAIDZ1 can survive 1 drive failure, RAIDZ2 can survive 2 drive failures
  • Failed disks can be replaced and substituted with one command (if no hot spares are available)
  • ZFS data pools can be shared via NFS, Samba/CIFS and iSCSI
  • Sun Solaris OS and ZFS are free and open source

So I just bought some hardware:

Total cost was HK$9500, with $4700 of that being the 3 1TB drives. If I went AMD and 4 x 640GB drives, I could have got the system for about $7000, but I couldn’t find the AMD motherboards supported by OpenSolaris and with enough SATA ports. So, it was a little more expensive that I had hoped. It better work!

So, this evening, I will mainly be geeking. Installing OpenSolaris, setting up the zfs pool and filesystem, then sharing it over the network and auto mounting it on my Mac. Then I need to transfer all my files.

x850 or x800

Published on 5/12/2005 in deep geekery. 1 Comment

Earlier, I said I was going to be picking up an X800 XT. I did.

However, when I opened it, the first thing I did was check the serial number on the card vs. the serial number on the box. They didn’t match. Oh dear. I then had a quick read of the instruction manual. More oh dear, the manual was for the 9800. I was now seriously worried. The card was well sealed and didn’t look as if it had been opened. Anyway, I thought I’d put it in my machine and see what happened.

I installed the card, booted up — it worked. Next I installed the software. Egg. The control panel said “Unknown card”. Riiiiiight. So I had a look at the Mac system profiler and it said:

ATI Radeon X850 XT:
Chipset Model: ATY,R481

What’s that?! The 850?!

So I downloaded the latest control panel app from the website. Now the control panel says X850 XT.

Hmmmmmm. Thanks!

See the differences here. Faster core clock speed and effective memory clock speed plus a higher memory bandwidth.

Soooo, do I take it back, or keep quiet?

shakytorrents

Published on 12/12/2004 in blogging and deep geekery. 0 Comments

UPDATE: No more shakytorrents.

OK, been messing about with BlogTorrent. It’s so simple, still in beta, but seems to work. Alas there is no Mac uploader yet, so I have to use my PC for that part at the moment.

So check out ShakyTorrents. I’ve also added a link under The Deets. Anyone can upload, you just need to leave the uploader running on your machine until a few people have the file. If you have no idea about Bittorrent and you are a Windows user, then click on the “Easy Download” link. It will download an exe that will download the file for you. Simple, as long as other people are seeding the files, which I will be.

So far I’ve just got a few files up there, some comedy jumbo jet landing and taking off, some queen vids, The Kleptones and all of Little Britain series 2.

Will have to upload some Christmas stuff.

relativity

Published on 1/12/2004 in deep geekery. 7 Comments

Something you don’t really think about every day, but interesting I think.

This article explains some real-world relativity with resepct to the GPS navigation system. It says, in a nutshell, that if relativistic effects were not taken into account in GPS, then the clocks (Earth and orbit) would be out of sync by around 38 microseconds a day. Seeing as GPS requires an accuracy of 20-30 nanoseconds, failure to take relativity into account would have rendered GPS useless.

Lovely.

UPDATE: via some site I can’t remember now, the Google calculator can prove this apparently. That’s:

((((one minus ((gravitational constant times mass of earth) divided by (speed of light squared times (cube root of ((gravitational constant times mass of earth times ((one divided by two) sidereal days) squared) divided by ((two times pi) squared))))))) divided by (one minus ((gravitational constant times mass of earth) divided by (speed of light squared times radius of earth))))) times (square root of (one minus ((cube root of (two times pi times gravitational constant times mass of earth divided by ((one divided by two) sidereal days))) divided by speed of light) squared))) times one day) minus one day =

forget ratemypoo.com

Published on 8/10/2004 in deep geekery. 0 Comments

Try out Rate My Network Diagram.com.

I am joking.


Referrer Karma has eaten 13 referrer spams on this site in the last 3 days.