My server box -. a quick update

Several months have passed and my ZFS box is running quietly in the corner, supplying me with music, videos and photos as required. It's pretty effective. A couple of things that I've learned and want to pass on: - ZFS is a pain to try and expand. I am aware of that, but I will say it again now. So I'll be spending some time in the near future compressing my data requirements by eliminating duplicates so that I can push everything onto 4TB when I need to and then expand the system as required. - fault tolerance really does work, and it works well.
Amazingly so.

One of the SATA connectors fell off and then a power cable dropped out, too; no problems with data. - you can't get ZFS to sleep, so don't try. Run a scrub once a week and you're good. - Samba can be a pain but now I'm getting 60MB/s plus and that's perfectly adequate for my expectations. Especially as it means I can run several card readers at once and the limitation is the reader / OS and not the network :) It's also really nice to be able to process remotely as it's pretty quick and frees up the laptop for other stuff.

Overall? I'm a pretty happy bunny. No upgrades to 12.04 LTS here, though; I want this system to work properly. I'd strongly recommend anyone who is looking at lots of disks in a case to think about suspending them. This box is currently in the corner of a large room (6-7m long) and I'm working at the other end. If the fan in the E6400 is on, I can't hear the box in the corner. It is running 8 (yes, eight) 3.5" disks and it's virtually inaudible from 5m. That's acceptable, in my book. Before you ask, 6 onboard SATA, one extension card SATA as ZFS, one onboard as Cache, and then the system disk is still EIDE (and maybe limits performance, but I don't think by much, if at all). It now has 8GB of memory and that seems to be enough to allow dedup to work.

- Bret

decent mountain biking video

something I've been sent and posted over on g+... enjoy! http://youtu.be/0zLuqKNKOqs - Bret

so, blogger has a new look and feel..

I've been very busy over on g+, building a following and so I've not really been posting much here. I think I'm going to try and change that and make a rhythm of posting on the blog and not just g+. The stream runs so fast over there that it's extremely difficult to get a post to have a half-life of anything over ten minutes or so... Anyways, right now, I'm arguing with a calibrator. And it doesn't want to work. At least, not on the Laptop screen. The additional 19 is now fine, as is the original profile that was attached to the laptop, but the rest isn't. And I can't work out why. Different combinations of gamma and colour temperature haven't helped, either... meh. Ah well. One more try and then away we go. What I was going to write about: I'll try and start a series on the basics shortly and continue that through. I know there are a few users of the forums I read and contribute to who were looking for this stuff, so I think I'll write some stuff down and then it's done. - Bret