Travels to the Edge of Insanity » projects

Homemade SAN, Why Not?

Andy — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:51:57 +0000

About a year ago we were facing a serious problem of storage. As amateur photographers we want to store the RAW photo along with the fully rendered JPG. Obviously the problem is with the two combined it can easily consume 10-12MB per photo, which adds up very quickly. Previously, the solution was to just buy larger drives for our primary file-server and migrate the data over. With the ever-increasing size this was becoming less and less practical, not to mention costly in terms of finances and time. I also hated the idea of a single file-server that for any reason could fail possibly damaging our data and requiring even more time to repair. We began to play with ESXi (as it was now free) as a means to virtualize all of our home servers that would enable us to better manage the systems and offer a better solution towards fault tolerance. The only problem was, do we really want to virtualize a system holding ~500GB of data?

Obviously no. So the solution was clear, construct a home SAN (storage area networking) or technically a NAS (network-attached storage).

I wanted a system that could hold a large amount of data, plus be scalable enough to support growth without the need to constantly migrate data from one array to another. The solution was using the open-source SAN solution OpenFiler. This offered us a very simple way to scale-up the capacity by growing the RAID array with new drives and resizing the necessary volumes. No more transferring data around and buying all new sets of drives.

I chose to have my guests that needed the increased space to connect via iSCSI to the SAN which offered me the most flexibility and network fault tolerance. OpenFiler supports many other sharing methods including NFS and SMB, which were appealing, but I wanted to have gating control over access on my file server and not the SAN.

This solution has been working great for well over a year now, and I would strongly recommend this form of solution. With the ease of media development, and the ever-increasing ease of media presentation within the home, building a centralized file-server makes more sense now than ever. Rather than putting a large drive or two in your system, you can consider using a SAN to offer better scalability.

Building the Shed

Andy — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:05:16 +0000

A few months ago our friends Dan and Sarah bought a cabin up in the woods as a great weekend getaway and skiing midway point. Only one problem existed: the wood shed was a rotten piece of sh**!

Last weekend, they asked us to come up and give them a hand building out a new one. Aside from the constraints that the Forest Service imposes, the designed shed turned out pretty well. We were only able to participate on Saturday and Sunday, which means Dan is probably working like crazy over the next few days!

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Bathroom Remodeling

Andy — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:38:02 +0000

When Natalie and I moved into this house a few years ago, it was always assumed that the bathrooms would need an overhaul. They were straight out of the 80s with the vinyl molding, Formica counters, severely outdated flooring. Shortly before we got married we had completed the remodeling of the master bathroom. We swore that the guest bathroom was next.

The Science of Sleep dvd

Well that was 4 years ago, and we finally got around to tackling the second bathroom. Progress has been much better this time around, having learned a thing or two from the first effort.

The centerpiece of the new bathroom was the new 20″ deep tub. The previous tub was so shallow I think the toilet was deeper. This tub will be surrounded with new marbleized tile and accompanied by a halogen light on a dimmer. Natalie chose the wonderful color of blue for the walls and slightly lighter color for the ceiling (not shown). The wood flooring, along with the new while moulding has done a great job of bringing the room back into the 21st century. Left for the project is replacing the ancient ceiling fan, and tiling the new tub.

A huge thanks to my father and brother for this assistance, without them I guarantee the doors would have been backwards, the tub upright, and the sink would resemble a water-fountain.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]