I’m a reasonably demanding home storage user, I guess I have around 3 TB of data and 4-5 TB of capacity at home. Photos take up close to 1TB, I’ve a lot of my own video, transcoded video, and music.

I’ve tried all sorts of solutions – external drives, Infrant (now NetGear) ReadyNAS, Drobo, etc. They all have their shortcomings. My Drobo, with over a TB of data let go. My ReadYNAS 600 died of old age (it was sad to see it go). Playing with multiple 1TB external drives is fragile and stressful. All of these products (except the ReadyNAS) are black boxes, the most status you get is a green LED or no mounted volume. At least the ReadyNAS has a MIB available, and I’ve used Nagios to monitor my ReadyNAS NV:

I’d also been thinking about failure, and I’ve had controller failures, PSU failures, disk failures; and it occurred to me that even RAID5 may not cut it. It seems I’m not alone in thinking this, and I found that Robin Harris over at storagemojo.com had been thinking this since July 2007. He also thought some more about disk reliability. I also like Joerg Moellenkamp’s presentation about the end of RAID5.

Feeling validated in my concerns, I decided to brainstorm a little and decided I need to have a storage facility to provide the following:

Fast response and transfer time; simply locate it on my GigE LAN at home.
Around 12TB storage, expandable
Rack-mountable
Open Operating System
Very configurable
Monitorable
The ability to support something more reliable than RAID5.
Be affordable, budget around $2k

There’s only one thing that meets all these criteria, I have to build my own ZFS Server.

By the way, fsck is not a rude word!

Firstly, I had a few hundred GB of ISOs that I needed to off-load from some external drives (for temporary storage, I use and recommend the 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F DT HD103UJ, a nippy and (so far) reliable drive with a 3-platter array. Maximum PC has a good review. I combine it with with good looking and performant Icy Dock MB559UEB-1S-B, with USB2 and Firewire 800 interfaces. I moved the ISOs over to the Drobo, after some testing, and of course, after I’d deleted the ISOs from the external drive, the Drobo started playing up.

It would restart a few times a day, and then it would hang occasionally. After leaving it for a while, I’d always have to cycle the power by pulling the PSU lead out from the back. I’d opened a support ticket with Drobo when the thing stopped mounting.

Something clearly had become corrupt, as when I tried to mount the Drobo volume my Mac (both my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro), would crash with the black screen. Not good. I used a combination of tools, including Data Rescue II, Techtool Pro, and Disk Warrior 4 – they couldn’t help. At this point I knew Drobo couldn’t help, and as the data was recoverable (albeit in a time-consuming way), I blatted the hardware and drives and put them in a factory default condition. I’ve upgraded the Firmware to v1.3.0, the dashboard to v1.2.4. and guess what, the damn thing is still restarting.

I’ve had it with consumer grade crap. I’m building a ZFS server.

I’ve also been playing with Evernote over the past week, touting itself as “remember everything” – or what I like even better, “capture, sync, find”. It’s just out of closed beta, so now anyone can sign up.

Now, Jott is great at capturing data and Evernote is pretty good at organizing it. I was wondering if I could combine the two, and I came across this great Lifehacker article explaining just how to do that.

A great combination, which is worth keeping a close eye on.

The original plan was to simply send the trucks current coordinates as acquired by the GPS via a TNC to the radio and out, to be picked up by other stations and relayed to an igate and from there onto the internet where many various sites show your position in near real-time.

This would have been a very simple setup consisting of a Garmin GPS16HVS, an OEM unit that basically integrates the GPS and antenna into a single unit without a display, a Kantronics MT-1200 TNC and an Icom IC-2200 single band radio.

However, I ran out of time (I wanted it working for our Utah “Hole in the Rock” trip), and didn’t want to go back to Radio Shack for another 2.5mm 3 way jack so I dug out my “spare” Kenwood TM-D700A, which has a built it TNC and would save some time during the configuration.

With the Kenwood radio, the system simply consisted of the GPS16 connected to the D700A radio.

Installing the GPS16 was a small problem. It comes with a magnetic mount, which, of course, is no use in an aluminum-bodied Land Rover Defender (actually, it’s Birmabright). The green D90 is a bit old and beat up anyway, so I wasn’t too bothered about drilling the roof. I drilled 4 holes for the GPS16 and another 4 for the cable passthrough (a waterproof marine-grade “Cable Clam“, made by Blue Sea Systems and available from from West Marine), and simply fed the cable through.

The GPS16 ships with an RJ45 connector, and I can’t imagine what use it has except for factory testing. After cutting it off, there are basically 2 sets of data wiring and also power wires in a very compact space (as described in the manual – PDF link). It’s a simple job, but fiddly connecting the power to my usual 45A Anderson Powerpole connectors and a 3-way 2.5mm jack. Initially I forgot that the data ground has to be cross connected to the ground, so the GPS did not switch on.

I removed the 2.5mm jack and connected an DB9 socket so I could connect a terminal to the GPS16. It was about now I realized that it wasn’t powered on (there is no indicator light to show this), but I was amising myself watching the NMEA sentences appear on my terminal. I also downloaded the Garmin SNSRCFG software, which enabled me to play with a ton of settings in the GPS16. I just made sure the data it was acquiring was correct before disconnecting it and putting the 2.5mm jack back on.

Then, I connected the jack to the radio and to my delight I saw the GPS indicator flashing, meaning that the radio was receiving telemetry from the GPS. Fiddling with a few settings on the radio, to configure it to take position data from the GPS and override the manual co-ordinates I’d entered earlier, I saw the “MY POS” indicator flash up, showing that APRS data was being transmitted. A drive around the block and a quick visit to db0anf, and I could see my position being updated in near real time. Success!

You can see my position updates here.

Overall, the Garmin GPS16 and Kenwood TM-D700A radio is a great combination for hands off APRS work.

I do have a few more steps to finish this little project, including making a small breakout box for the GPS16, which will have switched power and a connection for both the radio (via a jack) and terminal (via a DB9). And then I’ll have to do it all again for the black D90!

• blog.exerro.com – a blog that I’ll use when we’re traveling
• blog.nickt.com – a blog for the consulting side of life
• blog.http://nickt.com – this blog, which is a place for everything else

I’ve kept a similar look and feel across all 3, I host them all on Media Temple, which offers a great virtualized service. I’m running WordPress 2.5 with a mysql backend.

I’ve always liked Kyle Neath’s hemingway theme, but I noticed it didn’t support WordPress Widgets. It’s possible to hack the template a little to get this working, then I discovered that the NinjaMonkeys had already done this. It saved me a lot of time. Checkout Ninja Monkeys! Theme – Widgetized Hemingway for WordPress 2.2+.

I also added a few plugins:

• akismet – to cut down on comment spam
• uberdose all in one SEO pack
• flickr photo gallery – this is the nicest of the flickr plugins
• google XML sitemaps generator
• WP-OpenID – again, to cut down on comment spam
• Twitter Tools – to enable tweets on my sidebar, courtesy of Denver-based dev Alex King

As we’re off traveling again soon (follow our progress on blog.exerro.com), I’ve also started using Marsedit, to allow us both to blog offline and upload text and images whenever we can connect to a ropey internet connection!

http://modmyiphone.com/wiki/index.php/IPhone_unlock_OS_X_Part_1

Some more here:

http://iphone.unlock.no/#Step3-Performing-software-unlock 

A couple of extra steps here, if you get “no service” after unlocking:

http://www.djjeffa.com/vb/showthread.php?p=100869

And finally, here’s how to use your own tunes as ringtones (with iTunes 7.4.1)

http://modmyiphone.com/wiki/index.php/IPhone_Modding_for_Windows_102#ADDING_A_CUSTOM_RINGTONE

The second disk to fail in 5 months – another HDS HDS724040KLSA80 7K400 GB Deskstar. I’m replacing it with a Seagate Barracuda ES ST3750640NS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (from NewEgg).