Home Fileserver: ZFS hardware

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.
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Home Fileserver: I’ll use ZFS

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 use it.
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Home Fileserver: Existing products

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:
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Home Fileserver: What do I need?

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.
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A Home Fileserver using ZFS

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 a digital video recorder attached to your TV and wish to permanently keep some of the programmes/films you’ve recorded. Now you’re talking hundreds of gigabytes, if not terabytes of storage that are required to handle all this data.

And then there’s the problem of backups… oh boy, this will be a fun project 🙂
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Social Media Monitoring – Room101

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, that this will alienate their (potential) consumers. I’ll give you a couple of examples.
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Spam Poetry

I can’t be the only one who has a free email account, and from time to time checks the ‘spam’ folder before deleting it all, just in case some genuine person has sent an email that has triggered the spam filter somehow. The filth and annoying crap you find in there is just incredible. Today, I had a crazy idea for something funny that could be done with all this junk.
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The brands are listening to the bloggers

After scanning my web server’s logs I found some unusual activity and decided to investigate further. I discovered that it seems that brands pay some internet companies to scan blog sites to see what things people are saying about them and their products.
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How to enable your DVD player to play DivX format video from DVD+R discs

After my Panasonic DMR-EH57 HDD/DVD video recorder refused to play DivX format video from DVD+R discs recorded on my Mac Pro’s ‘SuperDrive’, I looked for a solution and found one, which I will now describe.
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