Simon’s blog

After deciding that I would use Sun Solaris and its ZFS file system as the foundation for a home fileserver, the next part was to select compatible hardware, as Solaris has fairly limited driver support for hardware.

After reading an article that turned out to be pure gold, namely: A Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore - The future of file systems, I felt a warm glow inside and realised that ZFS seemed to be the best solution currently available for solving a number of current problems, and I wanted to […]

When I began my search for a suitable fileserver, I found the choice of available technologies and products quite overwhelming, with each having their own pros and cons.
Here is a list of things I considered:

Before embarking on this project I asked myself what I needed a fileserver for. That is, what would I put on there and, therefore, how much storage space would I require.

For many people who use a computer, knowing where to store growing amounts of data can become tricky.
You start off with one disk, run out of space, buy a bigger one etc. And if you have a camcorder you’ll be generating gigabytes of data for every Mini DV tape you record. Also, you may have […]

As talked about at length in a previous posting, the brands / corporations are paying online snooping companies, err… ’social media monitoring’ companies’ to scour the internet for bad words said about them and their products.
Well, you’d think it would be obvious to a company that when they intentionally use restrictive practices in their products, […]