So, I have recently made some changes to my computing environment at home. I will update the farm page soon, but, I haven’t finalized all the changes yet. I can say that I upgraded a motherboard, which allowed me to put all of the original parts back in my Dell Dimension E520n, and set it up as a FreeNAS NAS device. It had its own set of issues in setting it up, but, its currently running a Core2Duo @1.86Ghz, with 4Gb of RAM, and 4.5TB of HD space. I ended up setting it into a RaidZ ZFS filesystem, using 1 disk for parity. Which ends up giving me around 2.6TB of usable space I believe.
I have started copying most of my online data to the array, however, I had a problem with the EXT4 file system that my old Linux workstation used to run off of where the superblocks had become corrupted. I tried everything over the last 5 days to get it working, and had nothing but problems. One of the biggest problems was using a SATA -> USB bridge on my netbook to try and run fsck against it. At 12Mb/s, USB1.1 really sucks for any kind of serious data transfer, and when you consider that fsck is going to read the whole 500Gb, and then write the whole 500Gb, I may have gotten impatient one or two times, and killed it so that I could try to get it to go over the SATAII bus. I finally got it to repair the superblocks by booting from a Gparted Live CD with it connected into the SATAII ports last night. And now I am sitting here booted off of an Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD, so that I could mount my NAS over NFS, and salvage what data I could from the drive before I wipe it. I know of about 6 files that grew from 1.5Gb to about 17Gb in the corruption, and there are another 4 more that I saw had shrunk to 16Kb. I am not worried about any of those files, as I can always reconstitute them from backups in one way or another. Unfortunately, when I signed up for Uverse, I just let them use their router, and as I haven’t had to do too much inter-machine transport, I hadn’t ever noticed that it has a 100Mb switch built in. I am now really wishing I had a 1Gb switch, as I can litterally see where that is the weak point in my current setup.
Anyway, its transfering over, and I will salvage what I can. Then I will do a low-level clone of the drive in my Hackintosh, which is what I built with all of the upgrades that I had stuffed into the Dell over time, and expand its root drive from 250Gb to 500Gb. I already have TimeMachine backing up to a dataset on the NAS, and its sharing through with AFP just fine. I don’t have Zeroconf/Bonjour working correctly yet I don’t think, but, it does work if I use the Go -> Connect to server path, and I know how to do that, so I am not too worried about it.