Today as usual I waited to long into the morning for any real meaningful walk. But then I decided I really should walk anyway as I obviously need a lot of exercise. So even though it was in the mid-80s temperature-wise I went for the walk.
Some how I made it all the way through. According to the fit bit it was five miles round trip almost exactly. And by the time I got back it was even hotter and I was really hot by then. But at least I’m pretty sure I’m going to sleep well.
Since then I read some of the first Wheel of Time book and had some lunch. I’m only just now starting to get back into working on the FreeNAS virtual box setup. Actually I also did some further “sprinriting” on some other drives. That took up some time but is hardly worth mentioning.
I did find this very informative albeit muted video that pretty much walks through it from install in a VM all the way up to accessing the drive in Windows. I’m going to try those steps next.
I did form an idea on my walk about my network setup: I could actually use the USB Ethernet card to connect to the rest of the network and the Internet and the motherboard NIC to connect peer-to-peer with the future NAS (er SAN, er iSCSI, er whatever) box. In fact I just tried and did a speed test with a 2 gig file: instead 6% utilization as reported yesterday it was sixty percent utilization. So what is that? 600 Megabits per second (60% of 1000)? I then did a similar test with both machines on the 100Mbps switch just for reference and it was 99% of 100Mbps. So yes, it was in fact be faster than if it was just on the switch. Now I kind of wish I had a gigabit switch, for all the good it would do all the other devices besides the two with gigabit Ethernet patch cables. Oh ya, I would have to buy a second gigabit Ethernet cable.
So the one downside to the whole thing is that to stream media I would need BOTH PCs on. Just to watch a movie. Instead of one box just sitting there happily hosting media files for the rest of the network it would be require the Windows 7 box to also be on to do the actual hosting. Because the iSCSI/Win 7 PC have this peer-to-peer gigabit dealie going. As I finally realized last night that doesn’t really work. So either I would have to use iSCSI over a shared 100Mpbs LAN or buy the cheapest gigabit switch I could find to daisy chain/seperate the iSCSI from the the rest of the LAN (although I don’t know if that’s really necessary) or just scrap my current 100Mpbs switch and replace it with a gigabit switch. Or just manually switch out the Ethernet cables if I really want to watch something other the Win 7 box has been powered down. Some how that doesn’t seem quite as “elegant” or whatever.