June 15, 2011
This week I stumbled upon a technology that was new to me: AoE, or ATA over Ethernet. This protocol was being hyped as a faster, much cheaper alternative to iSCSCI and NFS. In a nutshell, AoE “is a network protocol, designed for simple, high-performance access of SATA devices over Ethernet”. I found a short description [...]
March 1, 2011
The last several posts have described my foray into HTPC territory. My XBMC Live installation is humming along nicely on the Zotac ZBOX HD-ND02, and we are thoroughly enjoying it. Although the installation of XBMC Live was quick and painless, I have made quite a few changes to the skin settings, media paths, SSD settings, [...]
February 27, 2011
Introduction During the previous post I described my CD-to-FLAC project. The purpose of that project is two-fold: 1) create a digital, loss-less backup of all our existing CD collection, and 2) be able to access this mountain of media and play it on our main stereo system. I was already looking to possibly replace my [...]
February 10, 2011
My project the last several weeks has been to rip my CD collection to FLAC. This is so I have electronic backups of all my music, as well as to allow it to be easily played on the sound systems in the house. My previous post described how I set about ripping. This post will [...]
January 18, 2011
The story About four years ago I got started on a project to rip all my music CDs to FLAC. About seventy albums in, that project got put on hold. We moved the study from our spare bedroom to the basement when our boy arrived, and the CDs got scattered into numerous dark recesses of [...]
July 16, 2010
Introduction My home network has an ESXi machine I built earlier this year. Dealing with a SAN at the office made me want to enjoy some of the same luxuries at home as well. OpenFiler is a free, open source SAN Server, and is quite well thought of, so I thought it would be worth [...]