BLAG Ramblings of a crazy old fool

Blag, NAS, TV

I think the blog is just about where I want it. I still need to figure out how to recompile apache with mod_rewrite support and not break any other sites in the process. I'd like to use the /%year%/%postname% syntax as my rewritten blog post URL, but at the moment POSTFIX just looks ugly. I'll leave it at the default for now. Search engines may ignore it, but I can always add some SEO later. And I need to customize this theme as well. I was thinking I might combine the Eminence v3 look to give it an outer-spacey feel, but I haven't figured that out quite yet. I'd also like to incorporate some of my writings onto new pages, but that's still in the works. At the moment I'm pretty satisfied with them all being imported (except the old Andromeda's Peril and Andariel's Quest shorts I found) into Google Docs, but I really don't want to maintain them in two places. Or make them totally public. On that note, I still need to clean up the directory structure in this subdomain. Most of it is just there behind the scenes as reference for me, some of it is still hotlinked elsewhere. If I can get mod_rewrite going, I should be able to take care of both issues and just redirect the missing stuff to the correct location.

I recently purchased a ZyXEL NSA221, a two-bay networked storage enclosure. It is pretty sweet now that I've gotten used to it, though the transfer speeds are abysmal, even over a gigabit link. Somewhere around 8Mbps transfer. Reading from it is fine, and it has no issues streaming to two PCs and the Xbox at the same time, which is pretty sweet and mostly why I purchased it. I was hoping to get the built-in Bittorrent client working to auto-download from RSS like my desktop currently does, but it only supports 10 active torrents at a time, and isn't nearly as customizable as I'd like. So for the moment, it's just used as storage and a streaming media server. I wrote a batch script to automagically extract torrents as the finish, and move them to the NAS, for instant viewing.

I was originally hoping to use the NAS for my Music, TV shows, Movies, and as a backup solution for my user profile, but I severely under-estimated my space usage. I had purchased two 1TB WD Caviar Blue drives to run in JSON, but after having the first drive fail in under 24 hours, I decided to put them in as Raid-1 mirrored. So 2 2TB drives would have been a better investment, though at the time I thought I would already be getting 2TB of usage, and 4TB seemed a little excessive. As it stands, the NAS has only our TV shows, and is 75% full and climbing. I'm not too worried about it, most of the big TV show packs I have are ripped copies from my DVD box sets; If I have to throw a DVD in instead and delete the rips, that's not a huge deal. For the moment.

Planning ahead, I'd really like to look at getting a 5-bay QNAP NAS, which should give 8TB total storage, with a hot spare in Raid-5. Between all the PCs and the current NAS, we are using about 3TB, so that should give us plenty of space to grow. Having the failure protection will be really nice as well. One of the neat features with both the ZyXEL and the QNAP NAS' is that they can operate not only as a media streaming server, but also generic file storage, iTunes home network sharing, and an endpoint for VPN access. Having access to everything on the go would be fantastic, though not really a necessity at the moment. Jobs in the future may require a bit of travel though, so it could be soon.

An aside: I am a big fan of Newegg. They generally have the best prices on all the hottest electronics. However, my track record with them recently as far as storage is concerned, is not the greatest. Of the last five drives purchased, 3 have failed. Some people I've talked to indicated this could be due to how the drives are stored before shipping, but I have to say: Don't purchase storage from Newegg. You may pay a little more for the same product, but if improper handling is causing an inordinate amount of drive failures, you have to factor that cost in as well. The replacement may be free, but lost data is still costly. Also make sure you don't put your drives vertical, as they could spin too fast and let all the data fall out! ;D