If you’re a system administrator and haven’t heard from Areca RAID controllers, you’ve probably been living under a rock somewhere. Throw out your 3wares, throw out your Adaptecs (if you’re happy with software RAID, keep it), insert Areca for instant fun. 🙂

I’ve been using them for quite a while now and I’m quite happy, mostly in RAID6 configurations, with great performance.

Some things can do with some improvement though…

– Web interface looks a bit dated, but hey, it works

– Expansion of volume set through the CLI didn’t work on my box. Areca says update the BIOS, but it’s at the latest, Areca says update your Linux driver, but hm. Maybe later 😉

– More on expansion: I expanded a volume set, and the status changed to "Initializing(15%)". INITIALIZING. Sounds terribly wrong and datalossy for an online expansion… luckily it was indeed expanding it, as it works fine now 😉 But still. It got very hot all of a sudden…

Luckily it all works grreat now, so as long as they keep this up they’ll always have my Euro’s 😉

As a last post in this blogathlon, what I’m going to do next: well, move, obviously. Also migrate my server stuff which is still running on old Dual P3’s to the new Supermicro server as soon as I get the new chassis delivered.

After that, next project should be opening a nlams2 point of presence for Phyxia Networks at the NIKHEF datacenter in Amsterdam. 

For the new home: finally get the entire mythtv installation in working order. This includes: DVB-T inputs for VRT and RTBF, DVB-S to Astra (we don’t have any sat hardware yet, that’s for after the move), dual analog cable tuner on the PVR500 card, all on the backend machine; then the correct setup of the living room frontend, building a new frontend for the bedroom (we’ll also need a monitor or TV for there) and also finishing my Java frontend so we can also watch livetv (and perhaps recordings) on our Windows workstations.

Enough work I’d say 😉 

A note to employers .

Nice reading, beginning of the post is quite similar to "Time management for System administrators " intro text. Geeks live and breathe "geek". 🙂 

Installed Firefly Media Server on my home fileserver for fun (unfortunately not for profit 😉 ), and installed iTunes on my desktop. Never used it, but hey, it supports DAAP and that’s the big deal, right? 🙂 I have 22K+ songs in my iTunes player now, advertised via mDns multicast "modern" stuff. Yay!

Tried to use it in Amarok on my laptop as well, but no dice. If I add the machine manually, I can browse the files via DAAP, but the actual discovery doesn’t seem to work. I installed the avahi daemon which takes care of mDNS discovery, but it still doesn’t want to find it.. 🙁 Any tips?

If you’re there tomorrow, and you want to see me, gimme a yell 🙂

Hopefully this time the wireless network won’t be a notwork. 😀

Last week I spent some money in "gamer-izing" my computer case. It’s a nice Silver Lian-Li aluminium thingy, a bit less nice-looking because of 2 white/beige Plextor DVD & DVD-RW front bezels… So I spent some cash via Ebay on 2 nice aluminum bezels , a nice thermometer/fan monitor display , a few Akasa blue-led fans and a sidepanel with plexi so you can see inside the case (woops, some cleanup needed ;)).

Friday we had some time to kill at Mediamarkt , and I ended up walking out with 2 Samsung SyncMaster 920N 19" TFT monitors… Now I really got the über-PC 😉 (Unfortunately I already have a dead pixel on one of my monitors, so I’ll have to go back to MediaMarkt some day soon).

Yes yes… geek humor++ 😉