General | Thoughts and Ramblings

FreeBSD with ZFS root

It’s been a while since I posted here. I’ve been busy with a new job, new house, and a bunch of other things. One of these things was setting up my new file server. This is something that’s been in the works for a long time, as can be seen from the various posts on ZFS. I spent a long time researching this, and finally came up with my solution:

I did consider FreeNAS for a really long time. It is essentially a FreeBSD install with most of the administrative work done for you through a web-based GUI. It hit most of my checkboxes in that it supported ZFS, AFP, Bonjour, and a few others. While this is nice, I found it also to be limiting when one wants to stray off the beaten path. I didn’t want to lose ZFS, but I wanted something where I could tinker. I decided to go with FreeBSD.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, October 15, 2011

Why you shouldn't buy A Flip Camera

So, my parents were using a Flip Ultra HD to record sermons. This camera has a serious flaw which the company has acknowledged and failed to fix. First, the camera has 8GB of memory which it formats into a FAT-32 filesystem. This filesystem has a well known limitation where it cannot have a file which exceeds 4GB in size. The Flip camera, when recoding in HD, will hit this limitation in about an hour (depending on the motion in the video). The simple solution to this is to simply split the recording into multiple files so as to not cause any issues. Pure Digital Technologies, Inc, unlike their competitors, doesn’t seem to have figured out this simple solution but instead elected to have the camera beep and turn itself off. This completely violates what a consumer would expect out of a camera in that it will continually record until it is out of power or out of memory, or in the old days, tape.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Sunday, September 5, 2010

ZFS on Western Digital EARS drives

According to the stats, my previous post was one of the more popular on this site. This was in response to a question I was asking myself before building a NAS box at home. In looking at the components to use in building it, I came across another question. How does one fix the performance of ZFS on Western Digital’s green drives with model numbers ending in “EARS” (WD15EARS, WD20EARS, etc)? I’ve split this into sections, with a bold title, so readers can read the parts that are most interesting. I’ve described why WD changed their drives, why this is a problem, what the solutions are. Hope you enjoy this.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, June 16, 2010

ZFS on different sized disks

Note: Following this is not for the faint of heart. If you aren’t comfortable with partitioning, then don’t follow the steps here. I’ve read many posts on how to handle ZFS/Raid-Z on differently sized disks. The goal is to gain the most disk space availability while still retaining the redundancy of surviving a single disk failure. The posts I’ve read either would achieve the theoretical capacity, or be capable of expansion, but not both. I devised a way to get both at the same time, and it’s relatively simple.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Passed My Defense

I haven’t posted here in a while, and with good reason. About two weeks ago, I passed my Ph.D. defense. So, come May, I will officially have a doctorate in Computer Engineering, though I am effectively done with my degree.

Legacy Comments:

Steve - Feb 15, 2010

Looks like I get to be the first (at least on your blog here) to congratulate you - great job, Graham!

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, February 13, 2010