About My Days

NAS and Web-Server: Time Machine Backup

Research

Before I set up the SS4200 as a backup server for my Apple machines I did some research. The first blog I found was “OpenSolaris ZFS iSCSI Time Machine in 20 Minutes” by Michael Sullivan. The MacOS part worked fine for me. However, Michael uses the package SUNWiscsitgt which seems to be outdated. The current way to export iSCSI devices seems to be COMSTAR. So, what I configured on my SS4200 is COMSTAR and I use the globalSAN iSCSI initiator on Snow Leopard.
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NAS and Web-Server: Setting Up the Storage

Considerations

After OpenSolaris was installed on my SS4200 the next step was to setup the ZFS pool. First you have to decide what kind of data redundancy you need. I started with two disks, but want to be able to increase the capacity by adding a disk at a time. Consequently I decided to go for a raidz which uses one parity disk. A mirror might give more performance in a two disk setup, but the ability to add disk by disk to ramp up the capacity lead to the decision for raidz.

zpool attach pool raidz-vdev device

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NAS and Web-Server: Installing OpenSolaris

Prepare for installing

First of all you need an installation CD for OpenSolaris. I downloaded the current LiveCD from OpenSolaris.org. The SS4200 has no graphic connector and OpenSolaris does not use the console routed through the IDC10 connector. I.e. you cannot see the output once the LiveCD has started. To know what keys I had to press to choose the write start configuration from the grub menu I started the LiveCD in a VirtualBox instance. In short: Push 4x cursor down and hit enter. This way the LiveCD starts with SSH active.

To start the SS4200 with the LiveCD I burned it to a real CD and put it into an USB-CD-ROM-drive. I connected the drive to the box. I made sure the USB-stick I wanted to install OpenSolaris onto was not connected. Next I connected the terminal application on my MacBook with the RS232 connector of the SS4200. See my previous blog for more information. Additionally I connected an USB-keyboard.

Boot and Install

Pressing the power button starts up the device. To boot from the LiveCD I held down F3 on the keyboard. This led to a menu appearing on my terminal with a choice of boot disks. I choose the USB-CDROM-drive. The LiveCD booted and the copyright notice followed on the terminal – no more messages on this way. After about a minute I entered the 4x cursor down and hit enter. Some two minutes later I was able to ping the box and log in via SSH:

Next, I connected the USB-stick and started the installation:

The installation process went on straight forward. I just followed the instructions. After reboot and holding down F3 again, I chose the USB-stick as boot device. After another minute the system was up and reachable via SSH.

NAS and Web-Server: Putting Together the Hardware

In the Package

The SS4200 gets delivered with no power cable. Luckily I had a stock of such cables from the computers a owned so far. What I found remarkable is the way the hard-disks are mounted in the case. There are four bays that each take one disk. The bays have brackets that – when closed – form a rail with the bottom of the bay. Also in the packet are some bolts with rubber tops – shown to the left – that fit in the rails and thus secure the drives in the bays. The rubber top the noise-reducing decoupling of the drives from the case. › Continue reading

NAS and Web-Server

I have a Mac mini at home and my laptop that I backup frequently. I used to do this on an external USB hard disk. Inevitably I ran out of space on my backup disk and had to look for a solution. My first thought was to buy a bigger disk or one for each machine to backup. I already had some external disks flying around in a mess. Yet another one would end up in real chaos. › Continue reading

Wordpress: Now Version 2.6.3 (Subversion)

I upgraded my WordPress installation to version 2.6.3. To make it easier for future updates I used svn to checkout the current version. The next updates should be a simple

svn switch ...

My New Web Gallery

I was not totally content with the gallery plugins for PicasaWeb available for WordPress. So I started to write my own: hbPicasa. I was surised about the ease with which one can write plugins for WordPress.

Here is the principle according to which my plugin works:

1. Load feed describing your PicasaWeb gallery or album.
2. Use XSLT to transform the feed to HTML displaying the gallery or album.
3. Use CSS to manage the layout of the gallery or album.

After just about 6 hours of work, the first version is alive on this website: Gallery (Picasa)

Read on to see the inpost album of my last year visit to Barcelona.

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Posting from iPod touch

Now that I have updated my iPod to Wordpress 2.6.2 the iPhone Wordpress application works with my blog!

Wordpress update

I updated to Wordpress 2.6.2. I was a bit worried, since I had heart from others that ran into problems. But my ride was quite smooth. I just followed the instructions for updating Wordpress. That was it.

The only extra thing to do concerned my theme. My old theme did not support the new Wordpress widgets. So I downloaded a current theme and did some adjustments (new banner, some CSS fiddling for the gallery).

I only need to get some posts flowing to the blog.

Google Maps on my Blog

I added a feature to my blog. I can now add maps to the posts. This utilizes Google Maps and Google AJAX Search API.

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