Entry tags:

geek

Meltdown!
So last weekend, my linux mini-server decided that it hated its external hard drive. This is bad, because said external drive contains just about every digital photo I've ever taken as well as my entire iTunes library. I had been thinking about buying a second external hard drive and rsync'ing the contents of the two of them each day, but various things stopped me:

• The Lacie drive I have doesn't have a fan, i.e. I can't leave it turned on all the time without worrying about it catching on fire or something. I'm not too keen on adding a second uncooled drive to the mix.


• The existing drive has developed a weird clicking sound that scares the bejeezus out of me.


• I'm running Debian and Debian is about the most inflexible thing on earth. I was really worried about adding a second USB drive and then spending two weeks trying to recompile the kernel and figure out why other random peripherals stopped working.


• I don't get a warm fuzzy geek feeling from my current setup.

So, after a trip to Fry's and some Bittorrent'ing, I ended up with a whole new system. I installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft (is that the gayest name for a software release ever, or is it just me?) and set up software RAID-1 on two identical 200 GB SATA drives. The OS is installed on a separate 20 GB drive and the RAID array is used for photos, music, important documents, etc. If one of the two big drives fails, I can hot swap in a new one. The odds of data loss have been significantly reduced if not eliminated. I'm not sure what I'll do with the old 250 GB external drive...maybe use it for swap or something.

The Ubuntu install was, hands-down, the most painless linux install I've ever experienced (by which I mean it only required TWO complete installs, from scratch, before it worked the way I expected). However, the Ubuntu server edition doesn't come with some software that I expected--namely, emacs (it does have vi--bias?), Java (not even a JRE much less the JDK), Ruby/Rails (what freakin' year is it again?), and OpenSSL Server (who needs sshd on a SERVER?!). You do get perl, Apache, MySQL and PHP with the base install, which is pretty sweet. So far, I think I've got everything I want installed and working as expected. The only thing left to do is finish copying the contents of the old external drive onto the fancy new RAID drives and figure out how to set up file sharing with my Mac via Samba or something like that.