Well I was expecting to do the belated interview today but I got another call stating it was in fact postponed once more until later this week. I guess I will be called back eventually with a day and time. I stayed home today anyway rather than going to the volunteer thing. I am actually worried about my source of income come five or six weeks from now even if my outward appearance would hardly suggest as much. I’m just not sure I can really afford to go down to the city every day like I’ve been doing. It’s like the thing that would help me get a job, possibly the only thing, is also hurting me in a way. I’m sure there’s a word for that but I’m not thinking well right now.
I did go for another walk today. A little less than five miles if the FitBit is any indicator (it’s a device that literally indicates distance walked). I can only assume/hope I sleep really well tonight.
On the FreeNAS front I did a bit more experimenting with software raids today as well as actually trying it on a real life PC versus a virtual one. In fact I dug out an old micro-SD card and USB adapter for said SD card and tried to install FreeNAS on that. I booted the CD and tried to install it to the card but it kept throwing an error. So I did a raw-write to the card with the IMG version of FreeNAS and tried to boot it but this too ended in failure. Finally, I booted the CD and tried installing to the recently raw-written micro-SD card and wouldn’t you know it the SD card actually booted. And that computer is obviously way more silent this way
Then I took the same card to a completely different PC and booted it on that. Apparently (as I suspected) FreeNAS detects hardware fresh with each boot-up. Like a live CD sort of thing. I don’t know if that’s the way normal FreeBSD works but it’s certainly the way FreeNAS does, which is good for me.
Speaking of which I would like to complain about the usability of this “appliance”. Namely I was experimenting with software RAIDs and couldn’t figure it out. I had added all the disks and then went to the software RAID section to add the RAID but kept getting an error that I had to add disks first which only linked back to the add disks screen. But the disks were already there added, there weren’t any more disks. So I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. It was driving me crazy.
Finally after randomly clicking on things and add/removing things I eventually realized…well now I don’t remember. I think it was under format, one of the options in the list is software RAID. Or perhaps it was when I first add the disk I was supposed to specify software RAID. Probably the first one, on the format menu. Anyway the page was completely unhelpful and wouldn’t provide even the slightest clue as to what the hell I was doing wrong. It was really frustrating. And linking back to the “add a disk” page just made it worse instead of helping.
In better news I did actually get iSCSI to work albeit via VM as opposed to “for real”. After working at it for so long I was happy I finally managed to get it working. Of course it’s not exactly permanent if it’s a VM but at least I have some idea how to set up iSCSI now.
Speaking of which I was reading the FreeNAS forums and there was a thread in there under extensions/plug-ins/whatever that mentioned running VirtualBox. So ya, I could actually run a Windows VM on my FreeNAS box. That just seems funny to me on some level. I guess I would install it and get it set up on my main machine and then it was ready (and remote desktop was enabled) I would copy the VM and virtual hard drive over to the FreeNAS and start it up. Then I could run my Windows Server or whatever on my FreeNAS box. What would take up less memory: a FreeNAS VM on a Windows server box or a Windows server VM on a FreeNAS box? I don’t really know, although I’d like to believe some how FreeBSD was some how better at memory management thus leaving more memory and resources available for the VM. But really I’m just wishing it so.