moroNICS.net

I realize that my blog updates have been sparse and I can only explain by saying that my job has decided to run a stress test on me for the last few weeks (or is it months now?).  I haven’t quite succumb to the stress yet, but I’m definitely on my way there… I’ve been working as much as 12 hours a day, up to six days a week.  I’m definitely being punished for some unknown reason.  I’m just holding out for a letter of recommendation at this point.

Since I’m basically working 10am to 10pm, my social life has disappeared, because when I get home I tend to veg out on the internet. Lately, I’ve formed a habit of buying a lot of shit that I didn’t need, but I just have a desire to zone in on an expensive project just for my own personal shits and giggles.

My new obsession happens to be building a FreeNAS system out of some random computer parts I had hoarded and stored away in my hallway closet.  I didn’t have the heart to throw away a system that was handed down to me from a fellow World of Warcraft guildie.  However, my spare system is still rather out dated so I am not running FreeNAS 8, but rather version 7.  Also, I plan to run a Raid5 system since I don’t meet the system requirements for a ZFS system like someone I know; as I’d rather keep costs down for now until I really get a deep understanding for Linux based systems; it’s just a totally different animal from Windows and/or GUI friendly dumbed down Linux version like Mac OS X.

The requirements I had for this project were: UPnP/DNLA support for my badass new Samsung TV, low power consumption, low cost (not the same thing as being ‘cheap’), stability, and a webGUI (and not necessarily in that order).

All that I’ve really invested in at this point was a name brand power supply (430 watts), a cheap computer case, an IDE to compact flash adapter, a Kingston 8GB compact flash card; amount spent: under $100.

As you can tell by the pictures, the IDE to CF adapter prevents the ability to shove a third drive into place, so I basically screwed myself by getting a micro ATX mid tower case (I wanted something small, and I’m paying the price for it). I don’t really want to tie up an on-board SATA port by investing in a SATA hard drive solely for the OS (at least, not at the moment, future builds might vary). Alright, no problem I insist to myself:  invest in a 4-in-3 HDD cage, which really means 4 hard drives in three 5.25″ bays, and I can always carry it over into a future build or expand storage space by tossing in more hard drives.  After the cage was installed, it looked a little like this…

The new 4-in-3 cage really fucked up my cable management since it’s a tight fit (once again due to it being a micro ATX mid tower) and air flow/cooling, but I think I’ll just give up on that for the moment.

Now the only two problems I have are:

• Lack of video card: the motherboard will not POST without a video card installed (the motherboard being old school and all)
• Prices of hard drives being outrageously overpriced due to the Thailand flooding

My solutions are simple, but test my patience:  I’ve been wanting to upgrade the video card in my PC for a few months now (since I’ve been playing Skyrim like a motherfucker), so here’s my chance to spend money in a useful manner. I’ve had good luck with ATI (now known as AMD) and terrible experiences with Nvidia, so I’m going to stick with AMD, who just happens to be launching the all brand new 7000 series video cards within the next few weeks, which means prices will drop on the 6800/6900 series cards, which also means it’ll be good on my wallet.

As for the hard drive issue, I’ll just wait it out until I find prices dropping to an acceptable and reasonable price range for 2TB or 3TB drives, which gives me time to research how NAS-based storage systems (FreeNAS, Nexenta, etc) are dealing with the new 4k sector drives and try to figure out if any ZFS system is compatible with Serviio UPnP (or vice versa).

To sum up myself the last 2 or 3 weeks: I’m busy being nerdy.