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I recently purchased a new Apple Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard for use with MythTV. The choice of input device for MythTV is a very subjective thing to be sure, but I love this device because its as small as it can be without feeling cramped, its thin, light weight, and stylish.

Setting the device up to work with Debian Etch is fairly straightforward once you know what to do

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With the forthcoming release of Debian Lenny it happened to be a good time for me to re-evaluate my decision to use one monster RAID6 device to back all my iSCSI targets. I ran a semi-formal test on different disk configurations for software raid and came up with these results…

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Recently I came upon the need to do all my network routing and firewalling inside a Xen domU. I am not the first to do this but I thought I’d do a little write up on it to help others trying to accomplish the same thing in Debian.

The idea here is to end up with (at least) two VLANs on the network with the dom0 and domU’s being able to choose one or both networks on which to exist. In the case of both, you can set up a handy domU firewall/gateway :)

As you can see from the diagram above, we will end up with three bridges in the dom0 with all the appropriate glue to tie everything together. Best of all, this is all assembled on the fly during bootup.

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This wasnt incredibly difficult to figure out, but if you have a Debian etch system with iscsi-target compiled from source (as I regularly do) getting both open-iscsi and iscsi-target to play nice together takes a small amount of fiddling.

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The next phase of this project is choosing AoE or iSCSI. The debate on the relative merits of each protocol continues to rage on the Internet but in my particular case the criteria are pretty simple; which one performs better without causing excessive system load? Just from reading about the two protocols I am already leaning toward iSCSI for the simple fact that I can use all my TCP/IP management tools (routing, NAT, firewalling, etc.) on every iSCSI device. The only (potential) drawback is CPU load on the involved systems since it has to calculate TCP checksums for all those packets. Yes, there are many, many other advantages of one protocol over the other. No, they don’t matter to me in this scenario :-) So here we go!

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On the plate today is getting ethernet interface bonding working to provide load balancing and failover on the dual onboard gigabit interfaces on our home-built Coraid.

This actually turns out to be much easier than expected…

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Performance and failure testing are next up in building our kickin’ iSCSI/AoE device.

The Debian Etch installer supports building and installing onto software RAID arrays. Because of that…

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Todays adventure with building a SAN on the cheap involves attempting to get hotplug working and changing device mappings.

First of all, hotplug. I have discovered that…

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AoE (ATA over Ethernet) and iSCSI are the hot new things. Xen is the hot new thing. I like using hot new things as long as they can be made rock solid.

There happens to be a company (Coraid) that makes a turnkey AoE device. Its far cheaper than a true fibre channel SAN or something similar. Perfect for setting up a SAN over Ethernet device that can serve Xen domU filesystems out to “thin” dom0’s on the network.

Well that’s all well and good but you see I’m always looking to save a buck…

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After multiple attempts and not enough time to make it happen, I’ve officially shelved my backport projects for etch. The guys over at backports.org not only do a better job but seem to have more time to devote to the project than I do.

For those of you who may have been waiting for me to backport bacula 2.2.6 to etch I would to direct you to backports.org. They have a pretty great setup for picking and choosing newer packages that you’d like to install on your etch system. As of this writing, bacula 2.2.5 is available for installation.

Be aware that I do plan on continuing to make binaries for Mac OS X available since I still dont know of a reliable source to get them.