Matt Harrison wrote to me recently, to notify me about a guide he’d written showing how to integrate a ZFS-based OpenSolaris fileserver with Microsoft Active Directory. His guide covers all the necessary areas like: configuring Kerberos, synchronizing time/dates, enabling the CIFS server, joining the domain, user and group mapping, ZFS datasets, setting ACLs and auto-sharing […]
Author archives: admin
Home Fileserver: RAIDZ expansion
Recently I decided to expand the storage capacity of my ZFS home fileserver’s ZFS storage pool, which was configured to use a single RAIDZ vdev comprising of three 750 GB drives. I wanted to expand the RAIDZ vdev by adding one extra 750 GB drive. As you may or may not be aware, it is […]
Microgeneration
The UK seems to be embarking on a big nuclear power plant building exercise, to replace existing plants about to be decommissioned, to help reduce reliance on oil and gas, to reduce the carbon footprint and to increase availability of power for increasingly power-hungry consumers. These new plants will most likely be the new EPR […]
Two French nuclear spills in one month
July 2008 has been a bad month so far for the French nuclear power industry with two nuclear spills already, and the month is not finished yet. The first nuclear accident occurred on Monday 7th July 2008 at the Tricastin facility, where 74 kg of liquid uranium was spilled and entered the water table. Interestingly, […]
The Great Global Warming Debate
I would be the last person to claim to be an expert on issues related to global warming. However, recent news items that have caught my attention have made me curious. In today’s article American physicists warned not to debate global warming it appears that there is unease regarding the close examination of the figures […]
I’ve been Slashdotted
I knew it was only a matter of time before this happened, due to seeing high traffic in the web server logs and lots of links appearing, but today my website was Slashdotted. If you are a webmaster, this is either your best day ever, or your worst nightmare, depending on how robust your web […]
Macro magic 2
During a recent trip to the ‘Golden Triangle’ area of the Luberon National Park region of Provence, France, I took the following photos, mostly with a Nikon 105mm VR macro lens. This lens has excellent bokeh properties, due to the use of a nine-blade rounded diaphragm opening, giving pleasing effects in the out-of-focus areas of […]
UK police suspicious of photographers
In the last few months I have read a few news stories regarding the UK police treating photographers like criminals, by telling them that they are not allowed to take photographs, even when the photographers have clearly not been taking pictures of any items related to national security. It would appear that many police offcers […]
Legal, British P2P ‘by end of year’
Well, after writing this piece advocating a flat-rate music purchase model a year ago, today I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the likelihood of this happening seems to be increasing.
Promise Beyond
GarageBand is one of the applications you’ve probably seen on your Mac but never really used much, but it can be a lot of fun, as I discovered. Using the built in loops and the music editor, you can create music really quickly. It can start like a kind of ‘painting by numbers’ for music. […]