Category: Computers

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Review: Apple’s Leopard Server

As you may have read in my twitter feed, I have installed Mac OS X Leopard Server on a basically stock Mac Mini for my personal use. The Mini hosts email and webmail, calendars, directory services and a VPN without any problems at all.

For a little bit of background, by day I am a Windows and Linux admin and am responsible for about dozen servers and ~750 users. I am very comfortable with servers and how they work so this setup was not my first go in the world of servers. This web server is hosted on one of my Linux servers as a matter of fact.… Click here to read more!

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Review: Norco DS-1220

The DS-1220 is great. It was dead easy to setup and has caused me to trouble at all. I installed Fedora 8 in the days leading up to the delivery the the DS-1220 based solely on the fact that I saw something on the web that said the controller card worked in Fedora. Come to find out the drivers for the card are actually available in the current kernel and most distributions are coming with the driver available as a module. I did nothing to setup or install the Norco DS-1220 at all.

Let me take a short step back and bring you through the torment that got me to this place.… Click here to read more!

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Storage Update: Picking up the Pieces

Well, I have placed an order for the Norco DS-1220. I ordered it from Newegg.com as an open box item. It’s a bit of a gamble, for couple of reason. The first is because open box from Newegg means someone sent it back. It may have all of it’s parts, it may be missing some parts. Newegg will not help you out if the package is incomplete.. but it did save me $180. Newegg does offer a 15 day return policy on the item though so if it shows up and is missing some critical I can send it back and buy the non-open box version, albeit it at te $180 premium.… Click here to read more!

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Thecus: Dead again….

You would think I’d have learned my lesson already. I’ve been using my Thecus N5200 for a while now and, like clockwork, every 6 months it just dies. I’ve blogged about it before here, a lot, here are some of the posts.

Briefly, I had the drive in bay 1 fail again. It’s always that drive. No errors on the disk the Thecus just looses it. No errors in the logs, no bad sectors, it just disappears. So, I pull the drive out, format it, test it and put it back in. I log into the interface, tell the Thecus to use the disk I just put in as a spare which causes it to rebuild the array.… Click here to read more!

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Macbook Battery Life

I’ve just replaced the battery in my first generation Apple Macbook, well worth the $129 dollars. For such a small battery I was always amazed that I was able to get more then 5 hours of battery life and about 9 months ago when it started to drop off a bit I realized how great that was.

I will admit that to get better then 5 hours use has to be pretty minimal, but if I’m in a meeting or surfing the web while relaxing with the screen’s brightness down to it’s lowest setting I have no trouble keeping it alive for 5 hours.… Click here to read more!

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Thecus N5200 Failure…. Again

Wow, this is getting old. 36 days in and I’ve had another drive fail.. only not really. Sure the N5200 thinks it’s failed but if I pull the disk out and pop in back in, the array rebuilds and all is well. The logs show no errors on the drive, no bad reads or writes, it just disappears. What a wonderful device it is….

Also, even though the email test functions work the N5200 still does not send me email when something like this happens. I still have to log in every few days and check manually. Very nice….

Toplakr

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The Road to Mac OS X Leopard

AppleInsider has been posting a great series of articles about Apple’s upcoming operating system release. They posted one today talking about OS X Leopard Server that is really excellent. They go through the history of Apple’s servers and where they came from right up to present day and what to expect in this upcoming release. If you’d like to read more of their ‘Road to Leopard’ posts just scroll to the bottom of their article, they have links to their other posts there. I can’t find a good way to directly link to a full listing of all of the articles but a search on their site will bring them all up.… Click here to read more!

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OS X Leopard Release!

Apple has announced officially that the new version of Apple’s operating system, OS X, will be available on October 26th. If you buy it in a store you can get it at or after 6pm of that day, if you pre-order online it will arrive, via Fedex, on the 26th.

Yes, I have pre-ordered and will be waiting with bated breath for it to arrive. Apple has of course updated their website with loads of new information about the upcoming OS, you can take a peek at the feature overview or the huge list of 300+ New Features.

I’m obviously pretty excited, but new OS versions will do that to a geek.… Click here to read more!

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Website Down Time

We are back online. Seems we had a power issue and the servers didn’t come back online when the power was restored. Biggest surprise is that the Thecus N5200 came back online just fine… Didn’t see that one coming!

Topslakr

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Followup: Thecus N5200 – Perfect in Failure

Right, so 56 days after the massive failure I have another degraded RAID on my hands. This time I didn’t get any emails to tell me about it. Not sure why, I’ll assume the email part is my fault to give Thecus the benefit of the doubt…

I happened to load up the admin website for the device as I’ve gotten into the habit of doing and noticed the Array was degraded. I took a look at the disks and drive 5 was missing. Strange… I took a look at the logs and it showed the array going into a degraded mode but no mention of the drive falling off of the face of the earth.… Click here to read more!