the shaky kaiser

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dead drive

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

I was right, the 1TB Lacie Drive just died. It made a beep, then started making a kind of clicking noise.

It was pretty much full. All my TV shows and movies. Luckily, I’d copied everything over to other drives.

Anyway, don’t ask me about OpenSolaris install. It’s almost 1am. Still not even installed. A few hiccups along the way!

tooooooo many

Published on 7/8/2008 in blogging. 0 Comments

Too many bullet points in the last two posts.

Will do better.

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:

Cheapo Intel CPU
Cheapish Intel motherboard with built in graphics and 8 SATA ports
4GB DDR2 800 RAM
Cheap DVD reader
160GB SATA drive for the OS
3 x 1TB Hitachi SATA drives
Corsair 550W VX power supply
Coolermaster 690 case with space for 9 drives

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.

back, kinda

Published on 6/8/2008 in miscellaneous. 3 Comments

Well, I’m gonna try.

Tropical Storm Kammuri kept most of HK at home today.

Working from home right? Too far Tony?

Anyway, I decided on a bit of geekery. You know you missed it.I decided to upgrade my Wordpress installation from 2.3 to 2.6. Total disaster. The upgrade went fine at first, I could view the blog just fine. Couldn’t log in though. Known issue, but none of the suggested fixes worked for me. Time to roll back! However:

My database dump wouldn’t load (yeah, should have tested it first)
My hosting company had not been backing up the database!

Luckily, the awesome support dude at Liquid Web managed to fix my database file, so I’m back where I started. Shame, as Wordpress 2.5 and 2.6 look pretty nice. Will wait to see if they fix the upgrade issues.

So where have I been?

Busy.
Lazy.
New job.
Boracay (oh, there’s a story).
Tokyo. It’s the same as everywhere else, just a little bit different.
Getting caught with The Lady In White by Private Dancer Doris. Woman scorned? Jeez. Never, ever, heard anything like it. One iPhone smashed against wall.
Investigating awesome filesystems for a home fileserver. Spike - you should check it out!
Went to the gym for the first time in a long time. Agony for 5 days.
Watching: Rome, Battlestar Gallactica, Generation Kill, Mad Men, Tudors, RAF at War (LT - if you want to know how to rescue a downed Spitfire pilot, this is for you! In fact “this generally holds true for all fighters”), Carrier (I have a new found respect for the navy that prowl Wan Chai every 6 weeks or so).
Reading: Feast For Crows, The Blade Itself, Red Seas Under Red Skies, Red Mars, Agent Zig Zag (LT - you will love this one too), The Skinner, Flashman and the Dragon, Watchmen, Batman: Dark Knight Returns, From Hell.
Listening: Fort Minor, Simple Plan, Mobb Deep, Black Kids, One Republic, Elbow, Nas, Alphabeat, Kooks, Panic at the Disco, Motion City Soundtrack, Angels and Airwaves, +44.

Tip of the hat to Jimmy Two Times for many of the book and music recommendations.

Well, I’ll try to be back more often. I gotta tell you the Boracay Typhoon Story and the Private Dancer Epic Fury Story.

Actually, Private Dancer Doris was supposed to be here this week, but her Cebu Pacific flight last Friday had engine problems and turned back to Manila. Now she’s too scared to fly. Well, at least I don’t have to worry about her biting my knob off.

In a bit.