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 […]

USA preparing for civil unrest?

It seems that the U.S. government seems to think there is some impending calamity ahead, as it will be deploying the army on home soil for the first time. What problem does the government foresee? Who knows, but if they’re making it public by putting this info on the internet then it’s obviously not that […]

Home Fileserver: Active Directory Integration

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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.

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…