Hey! Look! A blog entry! Wow.
I finally got the photos from our trip to Montana sorted out and up.
More entries to come.
Opened my store on Etsy.com!
I’ve finally taken the plunge and have opened a storefront on Etsy.com and listed my first item for sale.
I’m going to be making wooden boxes, toys and puzzles and trying to sell them. 🙂
We’ll see how that works out for me.
This is my storefront. I still need to create a banner graphic and some more filler text.
The photos of the box I have for sale were taken using a home made lightbox and I think they look pretty good.
Unclear on the concept
Michele Bachmann continues to bring the crazy.
By KEVIN DIAZ, Star Tribune
Rep. Michele Bachmann, appearing Tuesday night on Fox News’ show with Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, dismissed as an “urban legend” reports that she had suggested on a preelection cable show with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that then-Sen. Barack Obama and other members of Congress may be “anti-American” and that the media should investigate them as such.
Bachmann also accused Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken of trying to “stuff the ballot box” in his Minnesota recount struggle with GOP incumbent Norm Coleman.
I don’t think its an “Urban Legend” if you really said it. Hey Michele, let me introduce you to this thing we call ‘video tape’.
10,000,000 images
Life and Google are putting 10,000,000 historic images up in searchable database.
Way cool.
FreeNAS Write Speed
I got an email from a user on the FreeNAS help forum asking me if I had tested the write speed of my ZFS RAID array.
He was upset that he was only getting 45 MB/second.
So I tested it:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=mytestfile.out bs=1000 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 49.676133 secs (20130391 bytes/sec)
Pretty abysmal.
I’m running on three 500GB IDE drives plugged into three Promise Ultra100 TX2 dual channel IDE controllers on a 2.3GHz Xeon with 1 GB of RAM, so it’s not the speediest of hardware.
Just for grins I tested the read performance by reversing the dd command:
# dd of=/dev/null if=mytestfile.out bs=1000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 21.032432 secs (47545619 bytes/sec)
As you would expect, the read performance is much better than the write.
I had run a whole bunch of tests on the hardware when I was building my OpenFiler box, I suppose I should run those tests again using FreeNAS.
I’ll have to figure out how to get bonnie++ running under FreeBSD.
FreeNAS and USB 2
I built my FreeNAS box last night. Then I built it again tonight.
I installed the three new 500 Gig hard drives, dug up an old CD ROM drive to boot off of and tried to install FreeNAS version 0.70 (BETA) to a 2GB USB flash drive. The FreeNAS doco claims it will run from a 32MB USB stick.
That didn’t work. I’m not sure what the problem was. The conf directory and config file got written to the USB drive, but when it tried to lay down the boot image it failed.
After trying that a couple of times I just decided to install the OS onto an 80 Gig hard drive that I had used for the OpenFiler OS drive. That worked fine.
Installation from the CD is pretty quick. Then you set the IP address on the console and point your web browser at it. It’s all GUI from there. (Well, almost all.)
The web based interface is beautiful. All the pages have the same look and feel, all the controls work the same way. It’s very nice.
After setting all the drives up in a RAIDz1 array (RAID5 I guess) and make the shares and such, I decided to make some tuning changes per HarryD’s suggestions.
After putzing around for a bit and messing things up, I discovered that my windows machines didn’t have rights to write to the CIFS shares. I figured I’d messed up something and maybe a reboot would help, so I rebooted the FreeNAS box.
After a few minutes I tried to reload the web GUI. No-go. Hmm.
I head to the basement and on the console I see: kernel panic – rebooting in 15 seconds
Oops. Looks like I busted it. So I turned it off and quit for the night. I’m going to blame the tuning changes I made, because I made them without understanding the implications.
This evening I reinstalled the OS and rebuild the RAID and shares. It’s all working fine except I had to change the group ownership on the shares (using the CLI) so I could write to them from my windows boxes. There are no permissions really, anyone can write anywhere. Fine for home use, but the SAMBA/AD integration still isn’t really there (this was a problem with OpenFiler for me too.)
So now I’m rsyncing my data back. When I copied the data off the OpenFiler box I plugged the USB drive into the front of the server and rsynced it directly. Unfortunately the server only supports USB 1.1 with a max speed of 12 Mb/s. Painfully slow. It took a week to sync around 400GB of data.
Now I have the USB drive plugged into my desktop (USB 2.0) and am using the Cygwin rsync client to send the data back.
The graph on the FreeNAS box shows that I am shoving the data in at a rate of almost 55 Mb/s! Whee!
Understanding Bench Planes
With this post a new category is born on my blog. I’ve been a woodworking for a long time now, and for some reason I have never blogged about it. I’m going to use this category to share links and articles I find related to woodworking and to talk about the projects I have in the works.
This first post is to point to an article by Christopher Schwarz over at Popular Woodworking where he discusses the different types of bench (hand) planes and their uses. A very useful guide.
The bench plane has three jobs in the woodshop: to straighten the wood, to smooth it and to remove it.
It sounds so simple when you put it that way, but many woodworkers are confused by all the different sizes of bench planes available, from the tiny 5-1/2″-long No. 1 smooth plane up to the monstrous 24″-long No. 8 jointer plane.
Add into the mix all the new bevel-up bench planes that are available in the catalogs now, and it’s bewildering enough to make you want to cuddle up close to your belt sander.
Believe it or not, there is a way to make sense of all the different sizes and configurations of bench planes out there and to select the few that you need in your shop. You don’t need one bench plane of each size to do good work (though don’t tell my wife that). In fact, it’s quite possible to do all the typical bench plane chores with just one tool (more on that later).
In this article, I’m going to walk through the entire line of forms of the metallic-bodied bench planes and describe what each tool is good for. Because people can work wood in so many weird ways, I’ll admit that what follows is equal doses of traditional workshop practice, personal preferences (formed by years of planing) and stubborn opinion that comes from growing up on a mountain.
And the FreeNAS Hits Just Keep Coming!
According to this article, FreeNAS v0.69 includes BitTorrent services!
Is there anything FreeNAS can’t do? 🙂
My new hard drives should arrive today, but I don’t think I’ll be able to build my new FreeNAS server until tomorrow at the earliest. 🙁
UPDATED
Apparently there isn’t anything FreeNAS can’t do. Here is a forum posting about how to add a Usenet client (sabnzbd) to FreeNAS.
Da-amn!
More FreeNAS Resources
Thanks to a comment left on my Backup Your Shit! post by HarryD, I have learned how to implement Snapshots on FreeNAS and also got a link in the comments on HarryD’s blog to LearnFreeNAS.com.
HarryD also has a posting about tuning FreeNAS that looks pretty useful.
Thanks HarryD!
Time to waste some time
Oh no. A web site of just 80’s music videos.
Talk about a time sink. This is awesome.