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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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I recently had need to wipe the passwords on a Cisco 1605 router and thought I’d document the process here. It’s really pretty easy…

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I recently upgraded my lowly socket 939 workstation to a mini-itx motherboard with a socket AM2 dual core CPU and integrated GPU. I’ve always tried to minimize noise in my workstations since I have a great pair of Grado SR60 headphones and extraneous noise bothers me.

Now that the noisy GPU cooling fan is gone (yay!) I’ve begun to notice the noise that my dual SATA hard drives generate. I got sufficiently motivated last night to figure out a way to silence them. What I came up with was a “hard drive suspension mechanism” of sorts that cost, oh, probably about $0.13. Best of all, the drives generate ZERO noise from vibration now.

Click here to see some pics. My wife’s laptop is now actually louder than my dual core workstation :-)

Binaries for the latest bacula-fd are now available for PowerPC and Intel.
Enjoy!

Bacula Client 2.2.7 Intel
Bacula Client 2.2.7 PowerPC

Today marks the end of Perl’s twentieth year of existence. Yay!

Read more about it here

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.

Here is a quick script I whipped together to convert flac files to mp3. Its nothing fancy but it does the job. Doesnt require anything but flac and lame.

I was going to include a bunch of fancy id3 tag stuff but to be honest most of the id3 perl libraries out there arent that great to use. I may do something like that in the future though. Since I use quod libet which has a fantastic tagger built in, it isnt really an issue for me.