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I have been looking to replace my two aging file servers here at home with something a little less power hungry and more cost effective to maintain. Running two sets of Raid5 stripped disks 24×7 was becoming impractical. It also was not addressing my growing concerns about protecting against data loss. I was looking for something versatile that supports protocols like WebDAV, SMB, Rsysc and can operate as ISCSI target. My search ended with Openfiler which looks to be a well packaged file system running Linux. While the IBM Server are more redundant, Triple power supplies, Dual Raid5 arrays they actually do not protect against data loss much more than the Dell does. With the launch of the Dell I will probably extend its filesystem out to use a remote target on a cloud somewhere. This way my data is stored out of sync and remotely. coupled with a near line USB backup I hopefully will feel better covered.
So the store starts when I recently acquired an old Dell 715 and thought it would be fun to convert it to run OpenFiler. It required some upgrades and a remote serial console install. Now I have a cool storage appliance running at home.

Steps here.
Dell 715n PXE install

Posted some updates

Introducing Tess and Betty my two new old Case Lawn tractors !

Betty
A Case 442 tractor with a 12hp Kohler with Hydraulic Drive
This tractor has been in use since 1975. I am the third owner. The previous owner and spent almost an hour going over what he has done to maintain it. He had original receipts and a manual. I later received an email from him telling me where the oil filler was.

Tess
A Case 108 Tractor with an 8hp Briggs and Stratton motor and Belt drive. Case 108 tractors are quite rare. Tess was built in 1973 and was in terrible shape when It was picked up. Every bolt was lost, all the wiring was cut. Carburetor was filled with varnish, shorted sparkplug, old gas in tank, all the drive pulleys where gone, Brake and clutch mechanism was gone.

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So in today’s web 2.0 I wonder sometimes why so many websites, website designers seem to miss one fundamental concept. What happens to a user when they mistype a link, or visit a link that no longer exists.  Web Content Engines today are capable of updating pages as they are being read, working links disappear all the time. I see this as is a fundamental flaw in the design of websites as a whole. Websites are designed to get users to content. Moving links and content around makes this process impossible. Any content that was once useful is no longer something that can be located via a straight book mark. Consider the example of a Library. The content of the Library is always on the move, books are moved around some added some removed. What is key is that any one book can always be located. Each book is tagged with an identifier and regardless of where that book went it can be located. Updated books can be repointed to by updating the tag. Online content should be handled the same way. Instead of posting it as some fleeting tidbit hopefully captured by a search engine or internet archive. It should be posted in a manner to make it as available and as permanent as possible. This is not saying that websites should not evolve and change, on the contrary. They should be able to evolve, and the evolution should allow for the legacy content to be easily relocated.

A secondary issue is directing users to where they need to go. Missspelling a page by a single upper or lower case still returns a 404 error on countless sites. Why is this ? We have so many tools for smart text and string matching and few of them are applied to URLS. I think that a webengine should be smart enough to correct typos or at least to direct users to the nearest location to where they could find help.

More on 404 handlers

I find that coming from a linux background and switching to OSX challenging. Sometimes I just want to play a tune, I dont want it categorized, or memorized. Just play it, simple. On Linux I had a choice of a large collection of media players all with different strengths. For me however I embraced mpg123 for its simplicity. So to my surprise the mpg123 in the MacPorts collection runs just was well as the linux one and allows me to play local media as well as streaming audio. Here is a little howto. streaming audio on osx with mpg123