couple of shots from yesterday...

I was out and about yesterday and have a couple of shots I don't find too shabby...

and then for the afternoon:

There will be more in my g+ stream this week. - Bret

quick update about ZFS

another update on my ZFS box; it would appear that the cache disk didn't survive the last reboot. That's not really a problem (it was a slow disk anyway) but still, the machine didn't really say much, just the status of ZFS now brings up a "removed" ... ah well, I don't appear to have lost any data, so there's no problem.

Now to see when we can afford an SSD for cache.

The scrub I ran last night after heading off to bed was the first one in a month. 78kB of errors...  on consumer disks, running 24/7. That's really not too shabby at all.

 - Bret

crashplan - or at least backups

... so now, I need to really, seriously start thinking about backups.

I've got 1.25TB or so left of 4, so I need a decent sized plan. 3TB isn't too far over what I figured would happen, either.

So now I need to get the backup plan sorted and working. Even with a 10Mbit upload (which I don't have), the backup is going to take a while. So I think it will be plan B... which means I need some more storage space.
I think I'll be getting another 6TB of space and then shift that to an external box, so I can add the remaining 2TB to the set while the other data is safe on the 6TB bundle.

Should be easy, right? Well, I should have a very large array at work in the next few weeks to play with, so that will put me in good stead for the speeds I can expect.

100 MB/s --> 6GB / min  --> around 3 hours per terabyte. I won't be copying it over with rsync, either, I have had a couple of interesting experiences with that in the last few days. Maybe set the disks up as a new vdev and then copy everything? But it's only a one-time thing, so maybe I can survive with it taking time.

When I've worked it out, I'll post about it. 150MB over eSATA would help, though. If I can get drivers, the PERC/6 might also work well, as then I could slap all of the disks in the one box. But the box is nearly full as it is, so it needs to be replacements rather than additional disks. Which is another problem I'll deal with when I get to it.
In the mean time, disk prices have also dropped nicely again, so I might even be able to afford the new space.

 -  Bret

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

no posts for a while here...

I've been busy. Over on g+....

I'll add some more content shortly. In the mean time? Shooting at -16 is not much fun!