As I enjoy Rands’ writing, I think his new book Rands In Repose: Being Geek just made it onto my reading list. As soon as I get through the other three books I still have in my ‘must read urgently’ stack.

Yeah, yeah, I’m somewhat behind the curve again. Anyway, for those who, like me, do like the power of CEDET in their Emacsen, it appears that -pre7 has now been available for a little while.

The move to the other side of the Atlantic from the UK is almost complete, I’m just waiting for my household items - and more importantly, my computer books etc - to turn up. So it’s time to start blogging again in the next few weeks. Due to some server trouble in the UK, combined with the fact that I do like Serendipity as a blogging system but was never 100% happy with it, I’ve switched to using WordPress on a server here in the US. The old blog will stay up, at least as long as the server stays put, but I won’t add any new content to the old blog.

This is a reblog of my “building a home NAS server” series on my old blog. The server still exists, still works but I’m about to embark on an overhaul so I wanted to consolidate all the articles on the same blog.

I’ve blogged building my own NAS/home server before, see here, here, here and here.

After a few months, I think it might be time for an interim update.

In its original incarnation, the server wasn’t as stable as it should have been given my previous experience of FreeBSD. For some reason, it would crash every few weeks and sometimes even hang on reboot. Not good, especially as it happened a few times while I wasn’t home. I guess I should have heeded the warning about the zfs integration being experimental… Things got worse when I added a wireless card and retired my access point. Roughly around this point in time I got fed up with this enough to go back and start building an OpenSolaris VM to try out a mail server setup similar to the one I’m running on FreeBSD.

This is a reblog of my “building a home NAS server” series on my old blog. The server still exists, still works but I’m about to embark on an overhaul so I wanted to consolidate all the articles on the same blog.

I’ve done some more performance testing and while I’m not 100% happy with the results, I decided to keep using FreeBSD with zfs on the server for the time being. Pretty much all measurements on Linux (both a recent Ubuntu Server and CentOS 5.3) showed lower performance and while OpenSolaris is a lot faster when it comes to Disk I/O and thus would have been my first choice for a pure NAS, the effort in porting my current mail server configuration would have resulted in the server being ready sometime in 2010…

This is a reblog of my “building a home NAS server” series on my old blog. The server still exists, still works but I’m about to embark on an overhaul so I wanted to consolidate all the articles on the same blog.

Unfortunately the excitement from seeing OpenSolaris’s disk performance died down pretty quickly when I noticed that putting some decent load on the network interface resulted in the network card locking up after a little while. I guess that’s what I get for using the on-board Realtek instead of opening the wallet a little further and buy an Intel PCI-E network card. That said, the lock-up was specific to OpenSolaris - neither Ubuntu nor FreeBSD exhibited this sort of behaviour. I could get OpenSolaris to lock up the network interface reproducibly while rsyncing from my old server.

This is a reblog of my “building a home NAS server” series on my old blog. The server still exists, still works but I’m about to embark on an overhaul of these posts so I wanted to consolidate all the articles on the same blog.

The good news is that the hardware seems to be behaving it for a while now and everything appears to Just Work. FreeBSD makes things easy for me in this case as I’m very familiar with it so I only spent a few hours getting everything set up. So far, so good.

This is a reblog of my “building a home NAS server” series on my old blog. The server still exists, still works but I’m about to embark on an overhaul so I wanted to consolidate all the articles on the same blog.

Up to now I’ve mostly been using recycled workstations as my home mail, SVN and storage server. Nothing really wrong with that as most workstations are fast enough but I’m running into disk space issues again after I started backing up all the important machines onto my server. That’s especially annoying as I started using Time Machine on my iMac and now haven’t got enough space left on the server to also back up the MacBook. Time Machine is great as a backup solution simply because it is so unobtrusive and it appears to just work.

Thud, thud, thud…

The sound of the developer’s head banging on the desk late at night.

What happened? Well, I had a requirement to make use of some smart pointers to handle a somewhat complicated resource management issue that was mostly being ignored in the current implementation, mainly on the grounds of it being slightly to complicated to handle successfully using manual pointer management. The result - not entirely unexpected - was a not so nice memory leak.