Today, after a mere two delays, I finally got to do the interview for this company. If nothing else I was very impressed with the building I was in. It was all super-secure complete with some kind of iris-scanning dealie for the more secure areas.
The interview started out kind of strange. The guy (it was just one, for once) asked me a question then some how got side-tracked on describing a portion of the facility before I was able to answer. I don’t think I ever did answer that particular question.
He asked about some of my experience and about my Linux usage level. I tried to be positive about my knowledge while still establishing I could learn whatever required. I still have no idea how I did. If it anything killed it it was probably that Linux knowledge. I guess I’ll have to wait and find out if I got it or not.
I have started to re-think my whole project with FreeNAS. After all that time spent thinking about it and learning and whatever. Because as I think I decided several years ago when I first set up the WHS box WHS has one and possibly ONLY one advantage over FreeNAS: being able to add and remove drives from the storage pool extremely easily. And it doesn’t freak out if one drive isn’t detected by the system on the bootup. The of the stuff is still accessible. On FreeNAS I don’t think that’s true. And maybe it wouldn’t be for an iSCSI anyway, I don’t know. I mean obviously if I have this thing set to auto-connect at Windows start to the ISCSI target but one of the drives wasn’t detected by the BIOS for some reason probably the entire iSCSI will be gone. Maybe it would come back up when I got the computer finding the drive again, I don’t know.
Besides the whole what-if-drive-not-detected concerns there’s the other concern: once a software RAID or JBOD or whatever is created there’s no adding additional drives. Well that’s pretty much what I already said. But what this means is I can’t gradually migrate my terabytes of data over to this new setup… in other words remove a drive my current WHS storage pool thus emptying it of data and add it to the FreeNAS pool and copy some data over then remove the next drive from WHS and add it to the FreeNAS pool and so on until I have all the drives and all my data transferred. I have to actually have all the disks I want to use in one place at once. And they all have to formatted before I can use them. So migrating said data is to one degree or another impossible. At least that I can see. Even if I utilize a whole bunch of spare SATA/PATA drives and do a real cleansing of unneeded data I still don’t think I could really, truly make the transition.
So now I’m stuck where I started. So either I’ll try FreeNAS anyway or just re-install WHS.
The last thing I’ll talk about this time around is my Android phone: a friend pointed me to this particular thread on the XDA forums about a leaked Android 2.2 Froyo release image and I couldn’t resist going through with it. So this friend of mine walked me through installing all the necessary components on my phone and getting the image installed. It took us probably around 90 minutes from beginning to end. Definitely not for the “faint of heart” or techno noobs of any degree at all. I was distracted by the above linked thread: every time I got through reading a page another one or two pages was added to the thread. I mean I would finish reading page 19, push next and the last page would be like 70. So I’d finish page 20 push next and the last page would be page 72 or 75. I mean literally 1 or 2 minutes there was another few pages added to this thread. I think this might be a big deal. As I write this the last page is 86. And it does seem to have finally slowed down.
Of course the real update will be coming some time in August and all this will be pointless anyway. There were just a few things about 2.1 that are fixed in 2.2 that I really wanted. Like the stupid navigator voice shutting the hell up when I get a call for instance. I mean what the hell? A speech synthesize talking over a caller? This is supposed to be a phone, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you know phone calls get the priority? Just sayin.
Haven’t used it enough yet to really comment fully but so far it does seem snappier. There are some additional bundled things that won’t remove for some reason. I didn’t even like the original 2.1 shit but now they’re adding more. Oye.