Plop in the Ocean

Plop in the Ocean tag:pgregg.com,2009-02-03:/blog//2 2011-04-11T18:44:39Z Movable Type 4.34-en What 16TB raw space looks like at home tag:pgregg.com,2011:/blog//2.345 2011-04-11T16:40:07Z 2011-04-11T18:44:39Z

I've been looking for some home backup solutions over the past couple of months. This has led me down both the do-it-yourself route and buying a ready-made solution.One of my requirements was that I wanted the solution to be more than just storage - otherwise I would have purchased a straight NAS box from the likes of Qnap, Netgear or if feeling rich Drobo. Most of these dedicated NAS boxes can be "rooted" to allow ssh access , however their CPUs are generally underpowered for general purpose use.Other requirements were that I wanted a reasonably small form factor and to...

Paul Gregg http://pgregg.com
One of my requirements was that I wanted the solution to be more than just storage - otherwise I would have purchased a straight NAS box from the likes of Qnap, Netgear or if feeling rich Drobo. Most of these dedicated NAS boxes can be "rooted" to allow ssh access , however their CPUs are generally underpowered for general purpose use.

Other requirements were that I wanted a reasonably small form factor and to be able to use at least 4 SATA hard drives, preferably with hot swap ability. Hardware raid was not a requirement because I intended on using a Linux distribution with mdadm software raid.

In the end, I ended up building two boxes.
The first, a home build, based on the CFI A7879 chassis

with a Gigabyte GA-D525TUD Dual Core Atom Mini-ITX Board.

The second was a off-the-shelf HP ProLiant Microserver which, to be brutally honest, was because HP were offering £100 cashback deal on it. This made the server much cheaper than you could possibly build yourself from components.

I added 4GB ram to each box (total 5GB in the HP box because it comes with 1GB).

The CFI boot drive is a 8GB (30MB/sec) CompactFlash card mounted as an IDE drive. The HP boot drive is a 16GB Sandisk Cruzer USB stick.

Finally added 4 x 2TB Samsung F4EG HD204UI drives to each box.

The CFI box has 8TB in RAID5 providing 5.4TB usable. The HP has 8TB in RAID6 providing 3.6TB usable space.

If there is more interest, I'll write up the build process is more detail with pictures.

For now - here are some shots of my utility shelf.

]]> VMware releases ESXi for free tag:pgregg.com,2008:/blog//2.321 2008-08-05T22:34:42Z 2009-02-01T22:29:10Z

Paul Gregg http://pgregg.com has released the ESXi Hypervisor free of charge. They obviously see the pending challenge from Microsoft, Xen and Virtualbox and are hoping to gain traction and mindshare in the community - but I have one piece of advice for VMware.

If you want to regain the "developer" mindshare - those evangelists that sponsor VMware in their corporations - then restore the VMTN Subscription.

VMTN was my affordable way in to VMware - and because of that and my persistence in my current workplace, VMware now has over 20 ESX Enterprise license sales.]]> Script to generate a list of valid email recipients from a qmail setup tag:pgregg.com,2008:/blog//2.319 2008-07-26T16:23:55Z 2009-02-01T22:29:10Z

Paul Gregg http://pgregg.com
Postfix provides a relay_recipients file (at least thats what the MailScanner setup called it) where you specify the specific email addresses that you are prepared to accept email for.

In the old days we used SMTP VRFY - which people dropped because it was a way to verify good email addresses and clean spam lists. However, by dropping it it seems the spammers just ignored cleaning and just blast out to any and all email address they could find. The irony being that the problems are now worse because we are constantly being bombarded by spam to bogus addresses.

As my primary email system is (still) qmail I needed a way to build a list of valid emails that qmail would accept - so I set about writing a perl script that would process the control/virtualdomains users/assign and dot-qmail files in the same way that qmail would.

The result is here:
http://www.pgregg.com/projects/qmail/makevalidrecipients/MakeValidRecipientsList.pl

Feel free to make use of the script - hopefully it can help others too. Note that it doesn't handle ~alias users, nor if you have a database backed system - but manual and vpopmail setups should be just fine. No warranty implied or given though

Use at your own risk.

Once I added the relay_recipients file to the postfix relay and waited a few days, awstats reported that 99.8% of all my email was to bogus addresses - wow! That is a massive saving on CPU (antispam/av scanning) and traffic.

Enjoy.]]> Release: vmclone.pl for VMware ESX Server tag:pgregg.com,2007:/blog//2.312 2007-03-28T07:56:04Z 2009-02-01T22:29:07Z

Paul Gregg http://pgregg.com
The tool will replicate and rename all the files in a VM with a single command line execution and optionally allows you to tweak (using regex) some of the options such as changing the memory size of a VM.

The tool is available here: http://www.pgregg.com/projects/vmclone/

I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions on it.

Thanks.]]>