Rik's Blog

As promised, first up is FreeNAS.

First off a bit of research was needed. Make sure I can run everything I want... Quick recap

• Squeezecenter for my Squeezebox
• MediaTomb or other for UPNP DNLA Server
• Bittorent Daemon with XMLRPC or Web front end
• iTunes server
• Samba/CIFS Server
• Provides remote access into my LAN via SSH (possibly VPN over time)
• ZFS reliable storage.
• Boot from USB Pen Drive

First up I looked at the 8.0 based RC releases that are currently being worked. Unfortunately they are just RCs and with a major change underway the RC (4) doesn't hit all the boxes.. And unfortunately there are no addons right now to add the support.

On the plus side - it installs fast and easily, and your up and running real quick. Once installed and booting from the USB drive it allows you to log in via the web interface. Everything is easily configurable, and setup is a doddle. Which makes the failures even harder to bear - so nice, so close - but missing what I need.

So I looked at 7.x series. And while now every box is ticked there is one annoying issue - the Squeezebox server is enabled through installing the slimNAS package - but it only supports 32bit and thus I can't make use of my lovely 8GB of memory. Besides - surely with ZFS I want to use that as much as possible.

Now, there is one solution. Install FreeBSD on a PC and then create the packages I need for running Squeezebox server or whatever I want. It's defintely an option.. however I would be missing some of the slick menus that are there in freeNAS.

And unfortuantely that's where we must part ways with FreeNAS. It's so close to being exactly what I need, but is just difficient in a few parts. If I had more time I'd definitely put in the effort to get it fully up to speed - but I want to get the server running asap. I will come back once it hits 8.1 or something, but for now it's not for me....

Nexty Entry - FreeBSD.

Those that know me, know I've had a server running at home for some time. Nothing special, but just lots of harddisks - runs a torrent daemon, DNLA/UPNP software - basically central storage and serving for everything I've got.

However there were faults with it.

1. Noisy - the Fan on the CPU was too loud, time to replace it.
2. Too many hot hardisks - some low capacity
3. Not all the same size hard disks - so no RAID
4. No redundancy so every time there's an electrical storm I run the risk of another disk blowout
5. Low memory - 2GB

An opportunity arose to upgrade the CPU to a quad core i7, (from an old core 2 duo E6300) - so got a new motherboard, CPU was free, 8GB of DDR3, and 4x 2TB Green SATA2 harddisks. Total cost - just €440 delivered!

So I've stripped out the old mobo/cpu/memory and harddisks and installed all the new gear. Case is now much more streamlined (going from ATX to mATX) as I've less drives, etc. Big Q now is what to run on it....

To solve pain point #4 above I need RAID. I could use the Intel chipset to do a RAID 1 reducing my 8TB to 4TB but with full backups. Seemed a bit pointless to me to waste 2 disks on redundancy. So ideally RAID5 is needed. And this is where I started to do a little more searching/thinking... There are 2 ways to do RAID - hardware or software. Each has some gotchas, as well as pluses obviously.

For hardware I had a choice - use the Intel stuff, which didn't have RAID5, or buy an external controller. Unfortunately even cheap controllers aren't cheap - about €160 (1/3 of my system price), and good ones are even more expensive (almost the same price again!). While Hardware gives you performance, your at the mercy of the vendor in ensuring compatability of your RAID set on future products if something were to go wrong - e.g. try taking a RAID set from one Intel chipset to another - it doesn't work. Independent RAID cards are a bit better this way - btu your still at their mercy.

So what about software.. Well things are a bit better here. You can always go back and get the software - even possibly an archive of a full distro with the right drivers and software - so in theory it's a lot less risky. But the downside is performance. You now have to use your CPU much more to do the overheads of the RAID algorithm, and write to the individual disks. Lucky me that I've managed to score a nice i7 for my troubles

Which left me looking at solutions. Time and time again it came back to ZFS being the best performing of the lot. However now I had a dilema. ZFS is supported on OpenSolaris, Linux and FreeBSD (as well as Mac OS-X but not gonna run that). Which to pick...

Linux I'm most familiar with. Linux ZFS support has issues, but is developing quite rapidly - 3 solutions exist, 2 native ZFS (zfsonlinux and kqstor)and a FUSE (zfs-on-fuse) implementation. It's been gathering pace and catching up on features but for the most part the impression I get by googling is that the FUSE version isn't efficient, and the native one isn't reliable. Which kind of defeats the purpose of choosing it. I could always go with MD driver on Linux, but I've ruled that out for now as I'd like to get the performance of ZFS if I can

I had a quick look at OpenSolaris - and there is still some activity - particularly on EON the NAS version. However, with Oracle effectively killing it last year it's hard to recommend using it.

And finally - freeBSD. 3 Install options are open to me - freeBSD release itself which actually has quite an old, but stable ZFS support (ZPool version 15), freeNAS which is based on freeBSD, or PC-BSD which is a desktop based distro. From a freeBSD install there are mechanisms, like nanoBSD, to reduce the install down to a USB pendrive. And this is what the freeNAS guys have also moved to - then add their magic on top. Unfortunately again, the ZFS version is still only version 14/15. FreeNAS is undergoing a lot of development now as it moves to use nanoBSD and get it's GUIs updated, etc. It's really nice and worth a look. And finally PC-BSD, it's a desktop version of freeBSD - requires a large install, but looks nice - may even just look for myself.

In conclusion - for latest ZFS versions Linux or OpenSolaris are ahead of the game right now. FreeBSD will get an update to v28 at some point - it's just a matter of time. I may be coming down too hard on the Linux versions, but impressions are slow or unreliable.. I may just have to test them to see which is better. And finally OpenSolaris - is it truly dead?

I'll be sampling these over the coming days/weeks and hope to blog about experiences.

First up FreeNAS 8.0 RC4

Am back

I implemented my spam stopping fixes only to break the blogging software - agghh.. Eventually I stripped back everything and got it working and restarted. Fingers crossed we're up and running more.

So, to my first new entry:

I've been trying out a lot of RSS readers on my latest phone - HTC Desire HD.

First off was Pulse from alphonsolabs. Great reader, and a very slick UI. The overall UI fits perfectly for a smartphone or tablet, allowing you to flick up and down through the various feeds quickly and easily. The downside at the time was lack of feeds on the smartphone versions - just 25. Version 2.0 changed that and upped the streams to  60! However - to do that they've had to split the streams into bundles of 12 streams across 5 pages. IMHO this goes against what the original UI was all about.. Yes I can customize whats on what page, but why limit to 12 streams. In previous version having all 25 streams there in 1 page wasn't an issue - in fact I wanted more! Now I have pages and pages...

In between these 2 versions of pulse I tried a few others, but what really stood out and am still using is Taptu. At first glance it's very similar to Pulse. But digging a little further things get better. First off the number of streams was higher (is now less since Pulse went to 2.0) which is always good. But more importantly it has 1 really cool and useful feature. You can merge the streams into a single stream enabling you to quickly scan through similarly related streams in one easy swipe across the screen - very useful when scrolling through news from various sources, but similar materials - e.g. Android news sites. The downsides are there too though - main one being that restriction of 30 streams While some might say the UI isn't as slick as Pulse's I actually prefer the card mechanism deployed in Taptu - is far easier to read for me. However, I think some ability to customize backgrounds and card colours could vastly improve the UI for all.

As nice as both of these readers are (and there are a bunch of others out there) they miss one important aspect. I don't just browse these news streams on a single device. I use my smart phone a lot, but not as much as my laptop, or my desktop, or even my work laptop. Which poses a problem - how do I prevent myself reading the same topic again and again as I move from one device to another. All of these readers fail completely at this hurdle... Not only do they not provide a desktop client, then do not sync across devices. Which is why once again I find myself falling back towards Google Reader and it's android app. It may not be as slick, it may not even be well targetted to touch screen devices - but it's the only tool out there that ensures I don't waste a lot of time reading news I've already read!

It's been quite a few months since the last post...

Why?

Blog spam...

I would log in every week or so meaning to post but end up spending about 30mins cleaning out spamming comments off the previous entries. And by the time I finished, any motivation I had to create a new post was gone. Comment spam on blogs is such a demotivator.

And before you ask.. I do have anti-spam enabled, installed and running on the software. However a lot gets through. IMHO the main culprit was the inclusion of a URL entry on the comment form. So how to remove it.. I've checked every setting possible in b2evo to no avail. Everytime I deleted the spam comments I did a google search on how to remove, found nothing and then stopped.

That was until a few weeks ago. Someone else asked on the b2evo forums and it was finally answered. Yes, I could have asked myself sometime ago, but again - the demotivating factor.. I really wasn't motivated to continue blogging, and thus why investigate too hard. But now, armed with the tips here http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=21622 I've hopefully put in place something which will stop spammers just popping on stupid comments with links to their sites - fingers crossed this reduced the amount of crap in my inbox, and thus allow me to post more.

So, I'm back. I promise to get at least 1 post in this side of xmas, and try and get back to doing more regular updates. I've so much I'd like to post about...

Until then

Rik.

As promised, another post to update on the nook, and other things..

Been doing quite a bit of travelling lately so have given my latest gear a good trial. First up is my Acer laptop. It's small 11" screen combined with a decent sized keyboard was excellent for use on the airplane. Did a range of things from watching HD videos on the laptop, to doing some php programming and debugging. All was pretty easy and pleasurable to do. Combine that with the 8hrs battery life I managed to get all of my 1st flight of 6hrs, and a good portion of my second one (5hrs) before I needed to charge or switch off. Finally, the ability to play a few games while at the hotel was the icing on the cake. The only downside was the graphics card - it's just not up to most modern games, and while it was quite good at playing the original Halo, newer games weren't so lucky. Might consider an upgrade next year...

Next up was my Nook. There is one serious downside of e-readers! That is they are considered portbale electronic devices and so you must turn them off for takeoff and landing... This is a pain. The main times I want to read are just these 2 points in the flight. Seriously need someway for them to bypass this rule and allow readers to continue reading at these times just like reading a real book. Aside from that everything was pretty good. Got a few free books through various offers, and bought a few. Was much handier to bring 1 e-reader instead of 3 or 4 big books. The GSM radio doesn't work in Ireland which is a pity, but at least I have wifi for when I'm at home.

Up next, my phone. Data roaming is way too expensive. I tried to see if I could get some prepaid data SIM card or similar to no avail. I did get a prepaid SIM for voice - but I didn't find any data plans. The good thing with the SIM card is I am now able to log into the US google market and from there buy and download paid apps! Very handy. Have some handy apps like tripit, and more to keep an eye on travel, and various news apps to keep me up to date, as well as facebook and twitter

And finally, my headset - Astro A30 Gaming headset. I haven't put a post up on these before. Might do it in the future. The really nice things about these are they are not noise cancelling, but at the same time they worked incredibly well on the plane, with very little background noise making it through so I was able to watch movies and listen to music very well. They are light which made it easy for transport, and I like the ability to disconnect the main audio connections close to the headset and store the cable. Particularly handy when going between flights when I didn't want to remove the headset, just take care of the cables.

A final note is how both the nook and my phone charge off micro-usb. This meant I had just a single charger for both with me! Very handy