techbustr

Hi, Wonder if you can help? Loaded FreeNAS and co...

2010-06-09T06:14:15.848-05:00

Hi,

Wonder if you can help? Loaded FreeNAS and configured to DAAP/iTunes. I can see freenas in the iTunes 'Shared' locatin and can see the files, I can play the files...but that is all. I cannot copy or move to playlists...any ideas???

Cheers

The drive pool is fixed in at least the latest (ma...

2010-05-15T10:11:34.322-05:00

The drive pool is fixed in at least the latest (maybe earlier version too?) FreeNAS. FreeNAS now natively supports Sun's ZFS, so you can use that for media storage and add drives too the zPool as needed. I haven't used it yet, but I plan to do something similar to your previous article with the ZFS trick. I think the UPnP has come a long way since then too.

Firstly, great article. My Q is what if the drive...

2010-04-19T17:01:17.259-05:00

Firstly, great article. My Q is what if the drive that fails is the one with the OS running on it :| Does it back that up too?

Been running openfiler with iscsi after I had been...

2010-02-17T22:23:04.985-06:00

Been running openfiler with iscsi after I had been using freenas for awhile. Iscsi with the microsoft initiator is great for hosting all my vm images. Block level!

I have been able to turn on duplication on the sha...

2010-01-08T20:36:59.044-06:00

I have been able to turn on duplication on the shares I want to keep multiple copies of, so in the event of a disk failure (say, like the one I had 3 weeks ago), the data is guaranteed to be on more than one disk. So no data was lost. All I had to do was send the drive in for RMA and when I received a replacement I popped it in and added to the pool. I was right back to where I started with very little fuss.

so you added all of those drives and tossed them i...

2010-01-08T20:06:01.710-06:00

so you added all of those drives and tossed them into a pool then what happens if a drive fails?

Sound like the drive pool is JBOD with all that entails when you span drives with the folder.

I'll stick with RAID 5 or 50

The best choice given your experience is C. It doe...

2009-11-13T13:38:11.089-06:00

The best choice given your experience is C. It doesn't seem like you've worked with a low level language like C and you can't really claim C++ if in the same time you admit you don't know C.
C is not as productive as C# or Java (not even close) but it has one major advantage which is to put you closer to the machine and give you the ability to understand the system level ( stacks, heaps, processes, threads, virtual memory, dlls, memory mapped files, etc...). If you are interested in learning even more about the hardware (cpu registers and instructions) you should take a look at HLA (high level assembly), it looks like C or Pascal but you can write real assembly. When learning a new language ideas for complete projects are useless and even harmful.

I know you wrote this a while back, but I have bee...

2009-10-22T13:43:19.044-05:00

I know you wrote this a while back, but I have been wondering the same thing. Like you, I was GOING to college. Now, I have gone to grad school (twice). Once on Uncle Sam and another time by working for peanuts and tuition. Now, I fall into the category a lot of people fall into. Overeducated, but the pay does not keep up with necessities of life nor paying back the government. So...go to college so you can earn so much more money, but the difference pays back what you borrowed in the first place. Why go then? I could have skipped 8+ years of higher education, worked at Denso and have more to show for my endeavors. Problem is: Uncle Sam won't get all of the money back. Once I am capable of attempting a payment, the longevity of the payback plan will exceed my life expectancy. I'm not so sure grad school was such a wise investment.

Good article. I really don't think it's a...

2009-06-08T16:06:32.909-05:00

Good article. I really don't think it's about what you study as much as it is that you go and finish.

Don't worry yourself about it. I've already set u...

2009-05-29T19:02:55.081-05:00

Don't worry yourself about it. I've already set up Visual Studio 08 on the box, and I might even get into some add-in development...you just never know.

Uhmmm... an MSDN subscription doesn't give you the...

2009-05-29T13:27:15.929-05:00

Uhmmm... an MSDN subscription doesn't give you the right to run WHS as an actual server. It's for development purposes only. Not that anyone's going to go after you, but, just saying.

I started with FreeNAS a couple years ago on old h...

2009-05-15T07:30:00.000-05:00

I started with FreeNAS a couple years ago on old hardware that was lying around. I found it to be rock solid (even when the software was in 0.6xx beta stage). I used Clonzilla Live to do image backups of my pcs to my FreeNAS server. Not quite as slick or automated as WHS, but it did the job.
Since then, I have graduated to the HP MS 485 and I haven't looked back. The remote functionality and automated backups are the killer features. The hundreds of add-ins are just gravy.

Thank you so much for your comments! I've continu...

2009-05-13T21:43:00.000-05:00

Thank you so much for your comments!

I've continued testing FreeNAS since I made this post. I have successfully configured Time Machine on 2 mac laptops to use the server for backups, and this has worked so far.

For performing backups on the machine itself, I've configured rsync to run 3 times per day to copy one of the 500G drives to the other. This seems to be everything I need for keeping a backup of my data on this drive.

A few of the biggest negatives I've encountered so far are around the UPnP service. Sometimes it stops working and I have to restart the service using the web GUI, which is annoying. Also, my music library is not overly large compared to some (30G) but fuppes took several hours to index this content. When it was indexed and I tried to access it on the 360, it would take several minutes to pull up the list of albums. Eventually I removed the music from my index, and indexing videos is very quick. Also, the index must be rebuilt any time new media is added.

I'll be very interested in a couple of things with WHS. I'll definitely be checking out the media sharing capability. I'm also looking forward to checking out the way WHS handles drives that are added and storing media across them. I'll also be looking to see how it performs copying files around and how processor intensive everything is.

Eventually on one of these servers I'd like to configure "something" to automatically execute once a DVD is inserted and rip it to a DivX file in my library. I think this would be *sweet* for a server hidden off in the corner of the closet.

Hopefully I'll be installing WHS this weekend to do some testing and I'll have some initial comments about it once complete. I expect the installation will be more involved than the FreeNAS process was.

I second StPatrick on the duplication feature : WH...

2009-05-13T15:12:00.000-05:00

I second StPatrick on the duplication feature : WHS duplication over several pieces of hardware is configured on a directory by directory basis.

I don't care losing MP3 and a few movies.
I don't care losing the backup of my PCs => it's only a copy of existing data.
I *DO* care losing photos that are stored only on the WHS server.

"basic" RAID mirroring (whatever the level) is a bit too expensive to secure all your data.

That's one of the point which makes my heart goes to WHS for the moment

Indeed FreeNAS is a good choice when it comes to N...

2009-05-13T10:56:00.000-05:00

Indeed FreeNAS is a good choice when it comes to NAS-only. When I was looking for a NAS for my home network, FreeNAS was also one of the options and was exactly the last one to stand along with Windows Home Server (pre- power pack 1 that time).
There are few reasons I have selected WHS over FreeNAS at the end though:
1. I personally wanted more from my server - to be able to install some kind of virtual machines.
2. Be able to install file indexing software (ended up with MyMovies)
3. Not sure about FreeNAS (didn't go that far), but WHS's duplication has saved my data 2 times already. Again not sure if FreeNAS has support for that - didn't checked.

Other than that - FreeNAS is one of the home NAS solutions IMHO.

That would absolutely be wonderful. I get to work ...

2009-04-24T09:31:00.000-05:00

That would absolutely be wonderful. I get to work from home if it snows or someone in the family is sick. Otherwise I have to be physically in the office. I always get so much more done working at home.

That's why I like to work from home... :)

2009-04-24T04:54:00.000-05:00

That's why I like to work from home... :)

2009-04-16T02:10:00.000-05:00

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Thanks! Seems like a crazy idea to begin with, I ...

2009-04-12T14:19:00.000-05:00

Thanks! Seems like a crazy idea to begin with, I can't believe they're actually doing it.

I just saw that on my RSS feed, that nuts.

2009-04-11T23:16:00.000-05:00

I just saw that on my RSS feed, that nuts.

Thanks so much for the info! I was able to boot t...

2009-04-09T13:32:00.000-05:00

Thanks so much for the info! I was able to boot the server with a Mint CD in the drive and complete the USB installation. Then I ran into the issue you mentioned...no support for bootable USB devices. :(

The other issue I have is the lack of built-in IDE support for the system. Everything is SCSI, and I have no devices for it. I DO have an old Promise Ultra 66 IDE card that I hacked to the raid version years ago. I'll have to check and see if it still works.

This is going to be on interesting server once complete.

You might be able to run from the USB adapter, if ...

2009-04-07T00:41:00.000-05:00

You might be able to run from the USB adapter, if the unit in question is able to boot from a USB jump drive. Judging by the documentation on the Dell support site it doesn't look like thats the case. Another low cost solution that you may consider, and that should definitely work, is to use an IDE adapter for CF memory cards. When last I looked, the adapter could be had on ebay for about $30 US, and includes an 8 Gig card. I would use this together with the painfully slow CD-ROM you mentioned to install Mint. All the other hardware, being Intel, should be fully supported by Linux Mint.

In regards to the second question, the dual Xeon machine should process video faster. In addition to the fact that it's speed per core is faster, it also has larger on-chip caches(512KB L2 and 1-2MB L3 depending on the cpu), which is a big plus when any audio/video processing is in question.

Hope this helps.