After you’ve bought your Shuttle XS35GT silent media center / HTPC, you’ll want to install some good software to make the system work well. Personally, I like the XBMC software, and here I’ll describe how to install it on the XS35GT. In order to reduce costs, use less memory & disk space, and make the […]
Category archives: NAS
Shuttle XS35GT: Installing XBMC Dharma beta 2 Live
After you’ve bought your Shuttle XS35GT silent media center / HTPC, you’ll want to install some good software to make the system work well. Personally, I like the XBMC software, and here I’ll describe how to install it on the XS35GT. In order to reduce costs, and make the system run faster, I have chosen […]
Shuttle XS35GT: The ultimate silent media center HTPC
The long-awaited Shuttle XS35 series of small form factor (SFF) PCs has finally arrived, after a long release delay caused by cooling problems. For home media center (HTPC) enthusiasts, this series of computers is ideal for making a media center because they are completely silent, due to the fact that the case houses no fans. […]
Home Fileserver: Handling pool errors
Until today I had never encountered even one read, write or checksum error on my ZFS NAS. Today I saw one checksum error coming from the mirrored SSD root boot pool which I have just installed. Unless you’re using a file system like ZFS (or NetApp / Veritas…$$$), then you’ll almost certainly never even know […]
Home Fileserver: ZFS boot pool recovery
If you should be unlucky enough to be unable to boot your OpenSolaris NAS one day, then these notes taken from a real restoration test might help you get back up and running again quickly. After setting up a supposedly robust mirrored ZFS root boot pool here using two SSD drives, I decided to give […]
Home Fileserver: Mirrored SSD ZFS root boot
When I started using this ZFS NAS for additional tasks, I realised that my boot environment was becoming more important, and was a weak point in this system. Initially I wanted to run a master copy of this website locally on this ZFS server, and that entailed installing WordPress and the OpenSolaris AMP package comprising […]
Home Fileserver: Media Center
Your ZFS home fileserver / NAS is a great place to store your music, photo and video media, and if you’ve setup your ZFS file systems similar to the way described in Home Fileserver: ZFS File Systems, then it will be quite simple to view this media from a media center. The nice thing about […]
Home Fileserver: OpenSolaris 2009.06
After running SXCE for the last year, due to a failed hardware upgrade, it was time to install OpenSolaris 2009.06. I was due to leave on a trip the next morning, but foolishly I decided to install a 3.5″ drive into a 5.25″ drive bay with some anti-vibe rubber grommets installed. When re-attaching the IDE […]
Home Fileserver: ZFS File Systems
Once you’ve built your ZFS home fileserver / NAS, you’ll want to create your storage pool, create your file systems and share them to various devices around the home, such as laptops, PC’s, Macs, media centres etc. I will go through all the necessary steps from start to finish, so you can see how to […]
Home Fileserver: A Year in ZFS
Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as ‘A Year in Provence’, does it? Oh well, never mind. 😉 After a year of using Solaris and ZFS for a home fileserver, I thought I would share my experiences here to give an insight into things that worked or did not work. Also, others have […]