As the title says, the Ubuntu is out. Not really because of some technical flaw or missing features (as the FreeNAS, NASLite+ and OpenFiler before), but because of lack of experience and patience on my side. Unlike other distribution which come pre-packed on DVD, Ubuntu installs from a single CD. There are 3 CD variations available: Desktop, which most of the people use and which is likely responsible for Ubuntu fame, Server and Alternative. I did not want to go with desktop - for obvious reasons, so I started to install Server. It installed OK, except it did not offered any option to create RAID. Technically, I still had the RAID created from experiments with OpenFiler, but as I was not sure in which state did I left it, I wanted to recreate it.
My love affair with OpenFiler did not last very long. After installation finished, I started browser, pointed to URL I was told by the installer and started to configure. The Web admin was OK, nothing really exciting, but functional. The bad surprise came when I was trying to define users - in order to define volumes later. And here came the screen saying:
Please note that Openfiler needs a central directory service
on the network to function, which it and the client machines can see and use.
You cannot use local users and groups with Openfiler.
Otherwise there is no means to implement authorisation
as one machine's information about users and groups can differ from another's.
You can configure the directory service below.
After spending most Saturday and Sunday fixing, coding and logging bugs, I finally got to moving ahead. Very likely it is about time, because the NSLU2 keeps producing strange sounds
The box has now additional IDE 160 GB IDE disk, which will hold Linux installation as well as "temp" share, which will not be RAID-ed. Sort of staging area for the stuff in flux.
After contemplating for a while which distribution to use - and generally, whether to build more generic Linux server with Samba or more appliance-type box, I went on with trying OpenFiler first. The truth is that my old Linux box did 99% of his services as Samba fileserver and very little as Web server / Java application server. Most of the fancy GUI applications were barely used - including pretty loaded Gnome and KDE installation (one can never decide which one is actually better). So why to repeat same mistake twice ?
I have been living with my Sony eReader for almost a month now and managed to read about two full books. If not the time crush in biometric project, I would have probably read much more than just two books - nevertheless, I do have some real life experience with the device.
First - the claimed battery life of 7500 page turns is BS. I have observed real battery life about 15-20 hours, so unless you manage to turn about 500 pages per hour, it just does not add up. I have observed that battery was good for about 1 full book (about 400 letter pages, or about 900 "small" pages on reader), read over 2 weeks period, the battery dropped from full charge to one segment. It is possible that it depends on how reading style - if you are turning pages and reading continuously, it lasts longer. Browsing through books seems to consume considerable energy. I think that 15-20 hours reading time is more than enough - it will keep you busy on flight to Australia :-). Certainly huge improvement against PDA based readers, where the battery life is 4-5 hours max. My 2 years old PocketPC is now down to about 3.5 hrs. I am still using it because a) I have lots of books in PalmDoc and CHM formats and b) I like to read in bed ...
Well, as it looks like, I was prematurely ecstatic about the new open source based NAS server. While the hardware works great, I had not much luck so far with setting up the software on top of that.
My original idea was to use FreeNAS, let it boot and install into USB drive and use all 4 SATA disks in RAID 5 set up by BIOS. It did not work. FreeNAS does not see the RAID5 volume created by BIOS and keeps referring to 4 separate SATA drives. So does Openfiles and few other distributions. After the USB key was initialized, the system did not boot and stopped with error message 'No Ufs'.
Quite seldom I see something on the net that is elegant, beautiful, and simple - so simple that it becomes obvious. Last time I had this feeling was with iPod's wheel.
There was lots of excitement about new Vista user interface features. The users who never used / saw OS-X, must love Vista. It is huge improvement over XP - much nicer, cleaner, very good typography, comes very close to Tiger. Linux users have their own great looking desktop XGL. From human-machine interaction point of view, neither Vista, nor XGL did really bring anything new - just caught up with Apple and added few eye candies on top. All this 3D-turning, spongy shaking windows, transparencies and rotating planes look indeed nice, but add very little to the functionality of Expose (besides, no one except Apple has two finger trackpad scrolls). So what is so cool about the BumpTop ? Everything.
As I mentioned yesterday, my expectations regarding Office 2007 were fairly low. I am not a big fan of office application suites and for most of my editing I am using either on-line tools (like Google docs or Writeboard) or Open Office. True, neither of them has the smoothness and fine polish of Microsoft Office 2003, neither has all of it's features, but - let's face it - I barely use maybe 10-20% of Word or Excel capabilities anyway. For which reason, I am not willing to pay premium just for improved user comfort.
Today was a big day in Ottawa Microsoft community. The Congress Centre was hosting large event - simultaneous launch of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange server 2007. Because I have almost registered about two months ago, I attended the event. The "almost" means that I tried to register right after receiving MSDN Flash email, but many people must have been faster - I was put on waiting list on two of the 3 tracks (Developers and IT Pros) and before I could even try to register for the third track (Business), everything crashed, Web site hang and I have never heard back from them, nor received any email. Until yesterday, when an automated voice reminder service managed to catch me by phone in underground garage under Brookstreet Hotel, and delivered first part of reminder - telling me that I was registered to attend something ... Too bad it did not tell me to what, when and where did I registered, before it broke off and I lost the signal. But I deducted that the only reason to call me would be a reminder of the Launch and after logging on to My Events, voila - the ticket was there. So I went. It was a tough decision, whether to sacrifice full work day and possibly evening ping-pong at Igor's - but - what the heck. Microsoft does not produce new releases that often so going away once in 5 years should be OK. And now I am glad I did go.
I have worked through my listening to the Security Now! podcasts up to middle October now (more specifically up to here) and one remark from Steve Gibson forced me to think very hard: how today's hard drives encounter hundreds of read errors a day (actually Leo said "hundreds a minute"), but thanks to ECC process and dynamic reallocation of sectors, this is invisible to the user, because:
" .... if a file is damaged because of a bad sector, it can recover that data by recovering the data, either moving it or kind of reformatting the sector underneath it to make it readable again ... "
After listening for over week to Security Now! podcast (thanks, Steve, thanks Leo and happy birthday), I've decided to actually do something about the security on computers around. I started to scanning my home network using "Shields Up" and was happy to found that the only open port was SSH, exactly as I thought I configured it.
As next step, I followed the advice from this podcast and used my hosts file to block out ads servers and other internet vermins. You may also want to look at the podcast notes, read full transcript or listen to it.