January 11, 2015
I began seeing an error in my vkernel logs in ESXi. The backup GPT table is not at the end of the disk, as it should be. This might mean that another operating system believes the disk is smaller. Fix, by moving the backup to the end (and removing the old backup)? This will also […]
January 10, 2015
Background Openfiler had been serving me reliably for about four years but had begun to seriously slow down as my media pool grew. My project of ripping all my DVDs and BluRays to the pool had slowly increased the pool size. The data was spread across three independent drives in the server (I don’t use […]
September 20, 2012
I’m always looking for ways to (cheaply) extend the capabilities of my home network. I have an XBMC box connected to our primary TV/speaker system, which is driven by media stored on an OpenFiler vm on my ESXi server. That works wonderfully and is easy enough for my children to navigate. There have been times […]
July 4, 2012
Background I had been successfully backing up to a NFS Datastore on my backup server running XP for the past year. Hardware issues began to crop up on the server (which was a hodgepodge of parts, most of which were at least seven years old) which necessitated a rebuild. A new motherboard, CPU and 8GB […]
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 […]
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 […]