Finally, I got a chance to work on my NAS build, since I’ve been on vacation for all of last week. The goal I was shooting for was to build at least 4TB of RAID 5 storage, with at least a gigabit network connection. Since I already have a 2 TB IDE-based NAS built on a Poweredge 2400 platform, and since I have a bunch of PE 2400 sitting around, I decided to go ahead and build another NAS out of one of them.
The Poweredge 2400 has several nice features Read More
Yikes. I really really seem to have an Ebay buying addiction. Sigh. I could try to rationalize it, but I’m sure there isn’t really a rational reason. I just like to find things and buy them. Oh well, moving on to the actual post…
So, I decide that I wanted some books for my birthday this year. I forget at this point what actually triggered it, though I do know I ended up with a set of Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” and Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Bible. Very nice books, and quite glad to have them. The next purchase was a set of 64 books from Read More
I was searching for something to write and decided the only thing of interest I really did tonight was try the Madras Lentils (lentils, red beans and spices in a creamy tomato sauce) I got at Costco last week. The box had 4 smaller boxes, which they called an entree size, and I think it ran about $7. So, I grabbed one out of the box since the wife decided she was skipping dinner, and I was hungry. I was surprised that it was fully ready to eat, though if I had read the box better, I’d have known that 
. It’s all natural, vegetarian, gluten free, contains no MSG or preservatives, and is kosher.
It came in a foil pouch, which of course means no microwaving in the pouch. It took about 2 minutes to fully heat it in a glass bowl slightly larger than the portion. It reminded me of a chili more than anything else. I can see this as a good vegetarian option for chili, with a few additional spices (and/or hot sauce), nacho topping or even hot dog topping!
I will have to try and reproduce this soon, because it would make a good alternative for my other Lentil Chili, with a few modifications.
I decided I would post this paper, from February 2007, since I can never seem to find it when I am looking for it. Of course, at the time I wrote it, I thought I was pretty clever. Now in re-reading parts of it, I realize I must have grown as a writer as I inwardly cringe. Still, the data is valid, and it does make an interesting read (at least in my opinion). Read More
I’d never heard of Shopsin’s General Store before, nor had I heard of Kenny Shopsin, but someone, somewhere in cyberspace recommended “Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin” on last Tuesday (I know because that is the day I ordered it along with “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn, recommended by @EthanSuplee). I suspect it was someone on Twitter, but since I can’t find it(search sucks for posts older than a few hours), I don’t recall. So, if you recommended the book on Twitter, thanks.
I had lived in New York, though not Read More
Saw Star Trek tonight. I’m not disappointed because I made sure and kept my hopes low. It wasn’t a BAD movie. It wasn’t a great movie. It was more firmly in the good category, but certainly not quite reaching the status of good. Here’s my “review”. WARNING: SPOILERS.
I’ve decided to build my new NAS on one of my PowerEdge 2400 boxes I have sitting here. I’ve got a Dual PIII 866 with 2Gb ram, GigE, and room for 6 hard drives in the cage, and up to 3 5 1/4 devices (I will leave the SCSI CD-Rom, and add at least 1 IDE DVD Burner). To this I will add at least 1 4 port SATA 300 RAID controller and 4 1.5TB Seagate drives. I plan on configuring the RAID to RAID 5. The debate now is FreeNAS vs. NASLite vs. OpenFiler. I’m currently leaning towards FreeNAS. What is your favorite?
I hadn’t intended to turn this into a food blog, but it appears I don’t have much to say during the week (probably because work and school occupy so much of my time). Since I really want to keep in the habit of posting articles, I’ve decided to try and fill the gaps with food posts, soon to have pictures!
Tonight’s dinner was Asparagus Carbonara, or as I believe it would be in Italian: Asparagi alla Carbonara. I’ve scribed the recipe the way I did it, which was to blanch the asparagus in the pasta water before I added the fettucine. This allows you to use less pots (always a winner!). I think I might have used too many eggs (so you might be able to cut back to 2).
Asparagi alla Carbonara
- serves 6 -
1 lb asparagus spears
1 lb fettucine
2 tbsp olive oil
4 oz bacon, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 eggs
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup pasta water
fresh ground pepper
container with ice water large enough to put the asparagus for a few seconds.
Black Bean Soup
- serves 4 -
Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium or 1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons chili powder, or more to taste
2 15 oz cans black beans, or 4 cups cooked from dry
4 cups vegetable stock
Tobasco Chipotle pepper sauce (if desired)
Salt
Course ground Black Pepper
Garnish
1 lime cut in 8ths
Sour cream or plain yogurt to garnish, or 1 egg
1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
Steps
I’ve had a business DSL through AT&T (formerly SBC) for the 7 years we’ve lived here. Initially I was hosting sites and my own email server, as well as having enough network equipment I wanted to play with to justify the expense. I got 5 static IPs and the fastest they had available 6 Mbps/768 Kbps. I’ve reduced the number of servers using that bandwidth, but increased the number of clients (and the per client bandwidth), and have had some times recently where things just don’t work too well, or pause, or just go wonky. Some days, youtube videos pause every 20 seconds, making them almost impossible to watch. I hear my wife constantly complaining about lag on her game server, and I can’t easily determine if it’s our side or server side. This just isn’t enough bandwidth anymore. Yes I realize that there is probably some optimization to be found, some new QoS rules I can put in place, but that all requires time, and I am critically short of that right now. So I decided I needed to get another internet connection to offload some of the client bandwidth usage during peak times. If Verizon would just put some FiOS service out here, I might be set with just one connection again (HINT HINT VERIZON!).
Obviously, I already have a DSL, so getting another one is probably out of the question (well, I didn’t research if it was, but I assumed so…besides, TWC has a faster connection anyway for cheaper…at least for now). So I decided on a cable modem from Time Warner (TWC). Their turbo is listed as up to 22 Mbps/2 Mbps, so this should handle our client needs just fine. The big question was how to add this connection into our network without disrupting our extensive network setup (MP3 streaming server, various test servers, VMWare boxes and other network shares and printers). I do have a RadWare LinkProof router load balancer (which would basically merge the 2 connections into 1), but I decided against it since I want to configure certain clients to use the new connection, while leaving others to use the older connection.
Here’s what I did, with a little background on the existing setup so you’ll understand it.
The previous configuration had all the client connections using a single static IP address routed through a Linksys RVS4000 router. The RVS4000 is configured as IP 192.168.0.1 on the internal network, handing our DHCP addresses for the clients from 192.168.0.2+. All the servers are on a different IP address off the DSL router (the RVS4000 sits behind the DSL router). The printers and other network devices all have static IPs mapped so I can make sure they retain the same addresses and all our shares and various services know where to connect. Obviously, I’d like the clients using the 192.168 network resources to still be able to connect, so I needed to figure out how to get the TWC connection to fit that scheme. Turned out to be so easy it amazed me (though I guess it probably shouldn’t since it makes total sense). I hooked the TWC modem to another router (a spare Netgear one for now), and then configured that to be be at LAN IP 192.168.0.254, and DHCP off. Since the router gets all it’s TWC info dynamically (the RVS4000 router has static WAN settings), I shouldn’t have to worry about that portion of it at all (though I am worried that TWC may change DNS servers based on dynamic IP allocated…that will take some time to determine. If that happens, the TWC modem will become the DHCP server since the RVS4000 DNS settings are static and will remain so for the forseeable future). Since the netgear router is now configured to be on the same network as all the clients, I connected it to the main gigabit switch in the server room and configured a client with a static IP address pointing to the netgear router as the gateway. VOILA! I was on, on the TWC connection vs. the AT&T one. I then validated the speed and IP address I was expecting and all was well. All I needed to do then was configure the rest of the clients to statically point to the correct gateway and DNS servers (I haven’t finished that yet).
Next up is to get a better router/firewall on that TWC connection. I have a PIX 301, or a PIX 306 that I could use, or I might go with the M0n0wall system I keep wanting to play with.
None
Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) by Lisa Crispin
Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing by Gerald M. Weinberg
Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes by Mark Bittman
Almost Meatless: Recipes That Are Better for Your Health and the Planet by Joy Manning
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