I don’t think I’m even going to attempt to read that last entry. I can only imagine how chaotic it must be and near incomprehensible.
I didn’t get a lot accomplished today except I’ve been trying to figure a solution to my virtual Windows server idea. I was convinced FreeNAS with VirtualBox OSE was the way to go. A light solution that could boot off of a thumb drive and also tell me about the health of the physical drives through a convenient web interface. But then I started to realize that’s all I really need FreeNAS for: the hard drive monitor basically. I started to think about this after hearing some about PHPVirtualBox, an alternative front end to VirtulBox’s VMs.
So then I realized well hell I can run a more official version of VirtualBox on Linux and I can only hope there’s at least one PHP-based front-end that will sit there and tell me hard drive temperatures and if something is about to fail or whatever. Otherwise I’ll just use the PHPVirtualBox thing to manage the VMs nice-and-easy. Right?
I have also been thinking about the way in which I want to split up the data. Or more specifically how I would like to redundantly mirror the data of this future virtual Windows server. I realized if I bought one more 1TB drive I would four 500 gig drives and four 1TB drives. In that case I could theoretically have the main storage be two 1TB drives and two 500 gig drives mirrored to the name capacity drives. Everything would be mirror in other words.
So I was thinking about this all week. I don’t know enough (yet) about Linux to know how to make the two systems sync with each other auto-magic. I mean I would have two separate physical machines each hosting these four physical hard drives. So if one motherboard dies or a hard drive then I still got the other one. And I wouldn’t want either PC running 24/7. So I was thinking like the primary PC would boot up and look for the back up PC for a few seconds and if it didn’t find it then continue on. And when I wanted to back up I would turn on that computer then turn on the primary which would find the back up and go into “sync mode”. That was my theory. I mean it seems a waste of perfectly good storage drives that I could utilizing. Maybe there’s some way to use one of the two combos as some kind of iSCSI deal on my primary PC that is automatically synced with this virtual server storage. At least I’d have perfectly accessible data, as if it were a local SATA drive or whatever, always redundantly synced. And when my primary PC was off all the data is still available to stream or across Windows re-installs or whatever.
Okay that might be adding a bit of extra complexity to the whole thing here. I’d have to know how to rebuild the iSCSI thing if it was broken some way. If I lost a disk how would the syncs deal that, that sort of thing. It is a good idea though. Just have to work out some of the kinks.
I’ve only just started looking at Ubuntu Server Edition and it looks like it has about everything I want: a small install I can boot off a thumb drive with enough capabilities I can add VirtualBox/PHPVirtualBox and whatever else later.
I will say for FreeNAS though: it apparently has experimental ZFS support. I don’t really know what the “experimental” part is actually supposed to mean. Will it kill a drive? randomly corrupt data? Is it just a CYA? I have no idea.
I’ve also pretty well convinced myself I actually need three 1TB drives: 1 as a storage for my primary PC since my two 500 gigs will be utilized else where, 1 to complete the four-of-each thing I had in mind above, and one as a “hot spare” if/when one of the drives dies I can just slap in a new 1TB to replace it. So I’ll probably order them all online and then I’ll inevitably end up running spinrite on all three before using any of them. I’ll be lucky to have to project started inside of three weeks.
I was also contemplating a new motherboard/CPU which would of course mean another $80 in memory. I say this because my current “server” is so inconsistent in finding all four SATA drives. It’s driving me crazy. And apparently the CPUs, drivers and BIOS updates for this particular motherboard are no longer available. Unless I’m thinking of something else. I was going to upgrade one of my other desktops but I was trying to save that for one more other purposes. And it needs a CPU upgrade anyway. I should do that anyway since I’m sure those CPUs will soon no longer be available.
Okay I think this is the blog equielent of rambling and my spelling skills are some how getting worse so I think it’s time for bed.