This Spring I got myself a Nikon 105mm VR macro lens and took it for a test drive. These photos were taken with a Nikon D200 digital SLR camera, but without a tripod, so were quite tricky to get reasonably sharp.
Continue reading “Macro magic 1”
Mac on PC ?
I’d heard of ‘Hackintosh’ and various attempts people have made to build their own computer to run Mac OS X, but I wondered if Mac OS X would run on a new computer I had just built — surely not, but I decided to find out.
Continue reading “Mac on PC ?”
Linux to get ZFS?
An intriguing post appeared yesterday on the blog of Jeff Bonwick, where it simply shows photos of an informal meeting between Jeff and Linus Torvalds — could it be that Linux will get ZFS soon, due to changes in licensing, or could Linus be joining the ZFS team with Sun, or something else?
Continue reading “Linux to get ZFS?”
Home Fileserver: Drive temps
With the summer coming on, the ambient room temperature is increasing, and so here’s a handy script to help you monitor your drive temperatures to help prevent heat-related data loss.
Continue reading “Home Fileserver: Drive temps”
Home Fileserver: Backups from ZFS snapshots
Backups are critical to keeping your data protected, so let’s discover how to use ZFS snapshots to perform full and incremental backups.
Continue reading “Home Fileserver: Backups from ZFS snapshots”
Home Fileserver: ZFS snapshots
The next thing you will want to master when running your own ZFS home fileserver is how to perform snapshots of your file systems, as this is a crucial part of helping to protect your data.
Continue reading “Home Fileserver: ZFS snapshots”
Home Fileserver: Trunking
I had two Gigabit ethernet ports sitting on this motherboard and I was only using one. So I decided to take the path less travelled, as you never know where it can lead…
Continue reading “Home Fileserver: Trunking”
Home Fileserver: Suspend
Considering that a fileserver at home will spend a lot (most) of its life idle, it makes sense to look at its power usage and see what steps can be taken to reduce its operational costs — i.e. power consumption.
Continue reading “Home Fileserver: Suspend”
Home Fileserver: Backups
Now that you’ve got your ZFS Home Fileserver up and running and you’ve got your file systems created and shared to other machines on your home network, now’s the time to consider getting some backup policy in place.
I’ll show a few different possibilities open to you.
Continue reading “Home Fileserver: Backups”
Home Fileserver: ZFS setup
The next step in setting up your own ZFS home fileserver is to set up your ZFS storage pool and file systems and then share them with other machines. The ZFS commands should work from any operating system where ZFS is available. I have used two machines in this example: a machine running Sun Solaris for the fileserver, and a Macintosh client machine.
Continue reading “Home Fileserver: ZFS setup”