I could go on, but I think Gina Trapani eloquently summed up my thoughts in just a few sentences.

That’s the thing about Apple marketing. They don’t talk about how many gigabytes of memory or how many CPU cycles or how many apps (much). They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments.

There you have it.  Apple versus the rest of the computer, mobile handset, software world in a couple of sentences.  Selling the why not the how or what.

Related posts:

1. Apple vs. Adobe (or Thoughts on Section 3.3.1)
2. Apple Crams Widgets Down Our Throats Because of the iPhone
3. Big 3 U.S. Automakers Must Contract

I don’t believe Apple’s decision to ban 3rd party developer platforms on the iPhone OS is about a lock-in advantage to the device or the App Store as many have written.  It’s about where Apple wants to take the iPhone OS as a platform.  Apple wants to avoid a middle-tier between the OS and the developer that may stifle the platform.  If Apple allowed 3rd party development platforms, there’s every indication that the 3rd party platform will hold the developers hostage when Apple decides to introduce new APIs or deprecate older APIs.

Imagine getting an iPhone OS update and suddenly half of your applications no longer work.  We experience this every so often on the desktop.  And it sucks, doesn’t it?  Now imagine it on your phone.  How annoying would it be to hunt down fixes for every little application on your phone because the makers of 3rd party developer tools didn’t react fast enough to the latest OS upgrade and the developers themselves became trapped by their development environment, unable to respond to user complaints?

It would be a horrendous experience for users.  Apple uses that excuse a lot, but I happen to believe it in most cases.  However, it would actually hurt developers more than users.  People would think twice about buying an application that may be susceptible to suddenly not working because of an OS upgrade.  I don’t want to have to look to see what language or platform an application was developed in prior to purchasing.

Microsoft fell into that trap and because of it, the burden is on MS to be backwards compatible; down to the level of replicating old bugs so older software doesn’t break.  Microsoft innovation is stifled because of decisions made in the 80’s about their application development.  I’m not arguing it wasn’t a good business decision.  The developers made MS who they are today.  But with all that cash, MS hasn’t innovated anything that’s captured the mainstream mindshare.  Sure, they do neat things with some of their enterprise offerings or side gigs like PhotoSynth, but let’s be real; these days the best the mainstream receives from Microsoft is another version of Windows or Office.  Bing? Eh.  Apple wants to avoid being Microsoft.

The bottom line is Apple wants to innovate.  They want to continue to move the stick forward. They want to continue to change the game.  They want to continue to roll out new computing paradigms.  They can’t be hindered or tied down by legacy.

Related posts:

1. Apple Crams Widgets Down Our Throats Because of the iPhone
2. More iPhone Thoughts
3. Thank You, Billy Hollis

Everyone has chimed in on iPad; everyone has glorified or bashed it. I’ve only read a few reviews where people seem to really get what’s going on here. Last night I was reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (a book I’ve been intending to read since it came out–and yes I was reading it on my iPad) and I came across this passage that I felt was exactly the computing paradigm shift that’s happening and how the iPad bashers sound:

“If you’re too old in nineteen seventy-five, then you’d already have a job at IBM out of college, and once people started at IBM, they had a real hard time making the transition to the new world,” says Nathan Myhrvold, who was a top executive at Microsoft for many years. “You had this multibillion-dollar company making mainframes, and if you were part of that, you’d think, Why screw around with these pathetic little computers? That was the computer industry to those people, and it had nothing to do with this new revolution. They were blinded by that being the only vision of computing. They made a nice living. It’s just that there was no opportunity to become a zillionaire and make an impact on the world.”

I’ll post more thoughts on this new device when I find time (and that time thing is another post as well, I’ve been busy to say the least).

And yes, I wrote this post on WordPress for iPad. And it was a lovely experience.

Related posts:

1. Apple vs. Adobe (or Thoughts on Section 3.3.1)
2. Apple’s War on Tech Specs
3. Thoughts on Obama

Continuing with my backup and archiving strategy, one of my goals was to get a grip on the growing number of SDHC cards I use with my video cameras; mainly my Canon HF10.  I’ve been ordering about five 4GB cards every couple months.  Besides being small and easy to lose, they are difficult to label and therefore difficult to manage from an archiving perspective.

There are a few options to deal with this.  I could import the video from the cards into iMovie or Final Cut Express and reuse the cards, but there are a few disadvantages to doing this.  First, the imported AVCHD video files are huge compared to their natural compressed state on the SDHC card.  Second, you never know when you need to get the video back on the camera in its original form.  Another option is to use iMovie’s archive feature, which copies the contents of the card to a folder on your hard drive, but I found a better solution that provides many advantages.

I theorized that I could create an image of the SDHC card so I did a quick Google search to see if someone was doing this already.  I found this post on Scoopz Blog which is exactly what I was looking to do.  The short story is, using Apple’s Disk Utility, I can make a disk image (DMG) of the SDHC card.  Here are a few advantages to this technique as opposed to iMovies archive feature:

• Manage single DMG file versus directory structure—I’m copying the resulting DMG file over to my NAS (running FreeNAS), then letting FreeNAS copy to an additional external FireWire drive using RSYNC.  With the intricacies and caveats of multiple file systems, fewer directory structures and increased control over file naming becomes really important in backup/archive strategies.
• Mounting image acts like SDHC card or camera—When I choose to remount the DMG file, iMovie and Final Cut Express recognize the mounted drive as if I just plugged the camera into my Mac or inserted the SDHC card into a reader.
• Copy DMG back to SDHC card—Scoopz gives a very good reason why this is important.  In his case, his camera records 5.1 sound; however, iMovie can’t handle all of those audio tracks and reduces to stereo.  Getting the raw data back on the camera improves options for future usage.  There’s no messing with formatting the SDHC card the way the camera expects as the DMG handles that by its nature.

For a tutorial on how to make an image of your SDHC cards using Disk Utility, read Scoopz post.  As for naming the DMG files, I used a combination of camera, video format and a sequence number.  For example, canon_avchd_0001.dmg.

Now that I’m confident my raw video footage is being archived, I need to focus on labeling/logging the video in the event I need to find that one clip I want to use without resorting to mounting every DMG for browsing.  After researching a few tools to do this sort of thing, I decided that in the event I needed to recover this data, one less tool to install and configure the better.  And while I’m not 100% sold on the solution I came up with, I chose to do something now so I could proceed in archiving all of the SDHC cards on my desk rather than waiting for the perfect solution to present itself.

I decided to use a spreadsheet (something searchable) with a few columns:  REEL (the dmg file name), CAMERA, FORMAT, DATE, SUBJECT, KEYWORDS and CLIP THUMBNAILS.  I used iMovie’s import feature to grab screen shots of the clips for a visual reference.  I doubt this process will scale, but I’ll see how it goes.  Here’s an example of the spreadsheet I created using Numbers:

Related posts:

1. It’s Time for a Backup Strategy
2. Setup Time Machine on FreeNAS
3. My FreeNAS Project Part 1: Introduction

Update 11/27/2009 — As HarryD notes in the comments, FreeNAS 0.7 (which was still in RC at time of this writing and did not contain this feature) allows a much easier way to setup Time Machine using AFP.  See his post here.  I’ve not tested this feature in 0.7 and currently using the approach as follows.

In my overall strategy, Time Machine serves as a point-in-time backup and restore.  The use case here is I’m working on a project and realize I accidentally deleted an important file a few days ago.  Using Time Machine, I can go back and recover that file.  I’ve never attempted to do a full restore from Time Machine, and while I hear it works well, that’s not how I would do it.  If I have a catastrophic incident, I will treat it as a refresh point and rebuild my system from a new OS install and then reinstall all of my applications.  I find it to be a great way to do a spring cleaning of sorts—re-identifying the important tools in your workflow.

The first step is to carve out some space on the NAS.  After a lot of experimentation I determined the best file protocol to handle this was AFP (Apple File Protocol).  In FreeNAS, you can enable AFP from the Services->AFP menu.  Check the “Enable” box in the upper right of the screen.  I entered a server name (thenas-afp, to differentiate from the samba server), checked “Enable local user authentication” and checked “Disable AFP-over-Appletalk to prevent DDP connections”.

I created a directory structure on the NAS to store Time Machine backups (/mnt/NAS01/Backup/Time Machine) and then a directory for my primary MacBook Pro, which is named jb15uni.  You can create directories via the File Manager (Advanced->File Manager).  Next I created an AFP share so my MacBook could access the NAS.  On the Services->AFP Shares tab, I added a new share with a name (TM for jb15uni), a comment and set the path to my jb15uni backup directory.  I left the other options as default.  I verified the share was working and I was able to write to the share.  If you use the File Manager to create directories, you may need to set proper permissions so your local user can write to the NAS.  To do this you can SSH into your FreeNAS and run some chown and chmod commands.

By default, Time Machine is not configured to use network shares as a destination for backups.  To enable it, you have to turn on a preference to tell Time Machine to show network volumes.  To do this, run Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I researched quite a few ways to accomplish this next step, which is to create the sparsebundle image that Time Machine usually creates on its own.  The problem with the way Time Machine creates sparsebundles is that it will use the maximum available drive space because it’s supposed to be used with an attached drive dedicated to backups.  I certainly didn’t want 2.6TB of Time Machine backups on my NAS.  Because of how I’m using Time Machine in my backup strategy, I want just enough space to keep a few weeks worth of history.  I have a 320GB drive on my MacBook Pro of which about 220GB are used.  I wanted Time Machine to only take up a maximum of 500GB for backups.

The best tutorial I found that worked was this one which you should follow to create the sparesebundle.  One thing I learned—painfully—is that the way OSX names your computer by default will not work for the sparsebundle name on the NAS.  The problem seems to be the apostrophe in the default name (e.g. Jonathan Brown’s MacBook Pro).  To change the name of your computer, open Sharing in the System Preferences.  Be sure to change the “Computer Name” field as well as click the “Edit” button and change the local hostname.  I decided to keep my computer name short and descriptive—less than eight alpha-numeric characters.

Time Machine expects the sparsebundle to be named a particular way—<COMPUTER NAME>_<MAC ADDRESS>.sparsebundle.  You can find your MAC address by opening up Terminal and running an ifconfig command.  Your MAC address will be listed under the en0 device and will look like this:

ether 00:26:4a:00:25:c8

In my case, the sparsebundle name is:

jb15uni_00264a0025c8.sparsebundle

The command in Terminal I used to create my sparsebundle was (this is a one line command):

hdiutil create -size 500g -fs HFS+J -volname “Backup of jb15uni” jb15uni_00264a0025c8.sparsebundle

That command creates a sparsebundle file on the Mac computer that will grow to a maximum of 500GB, formated with HFS+Journaling file system.  Once Time Machine maxes out that space, it will begin getting rid of the oldest backups to make room for new.

Next, I copied the sparsebundle file to the share I created earlier on the NAS.  Initially the file is a few hundred MBs in size.  If you are connected to your network wirelessly, I recommend plugging into your network before configuring Time Machine as it will kickoff backup shortly after selecting the disk.

Open the Time Machine preferences in System Preferences, click the “Select Disk” button and choose the new backup share.  Time Machine will ask for credentials to the NAS share.  Be sure to enter your credentials to FreeNAS, not your Macintosh.  Time Machine will start the first backup shortly after selecting the disk.  The initial backup will take some time even if on a gigabit network.  I let it work while I slept.  After the initial backup, Time Machine will kick off hourly.

It’s a good idea to take a look at your files and exclude some directories that are not necessary to backup.  In my case I have a few virtual machines that total about 50GB.  I exclude those as well as iTunes music as my MacBook Pro contains a subset of music that’s already on my NAS.  iMovie events are huge and I’ve got backups of those which I’ll talk about in another post.

That’s pretty much all there is to it.  It may sound daunting, but it’s a pretty simple thing to do.

Related posts:

1. My FreeNAS Project Part 5: The Config
2. My FreeNAS Project Part 4: The Install
3. My FreeNAS Project Part 6: Final Build and Overview

Before I start writing about how this NAS fits into my overall strategy, here’s the final cost sheet for the project thus far.  Note that some of the components (APC UPS, Linksys gigabit router) aren’t technically part of the NAS device, but complementary devices to support my total strategy.  I’m happy to report that the total for NAS-related costs are $629.47, which compared to say  a comparable Drobo setup which would include a Drobo w/ 4TB ($799.99 + shipping) and DroboShare ($199.99 + shipping) to share it over a network, I’ve saved $370.  Not bad considering I didn’t intend to do this cheaper than buying off-the-shelf.

Component	Quantity	Price	Total
Donor Machine: Intel chipset w/ Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 460W Power Supply, DVD optical drive, GigE, 4x SATA RAID	1	0.00	0.00
SilverStone LC10S Aluminum Front Panel ATX/Micro ATX Computer Case (Silver)	1	85.49	85.49
Syba Ultra Adapter Dual IDE 40/44PIN To Compact Flash	1	13.98	13.98
Allegro 3PORT Firewire 400/800 Pci Card	1	64.78	64.78
TRANSCEND 2GB Compact Flash Card	1	17.29	17.29
Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Hard Drive 3.5″	5	79.99	399.95
Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches)	3	9.00	27.00
BFG 550W GX Modular Power Supply	1	89.99	89.99
Case/Power Supply Fan, 80mm, 3-pin, ball bearing	1	6.99	6.99
3-Pin to 4-Pin Fan Adapter	1	3.99	3.99
APC BACK-UPS XS 900	1	129.99	129.99
Linksys WRT310N Wireless-N Gigabit Router	1	129.99	129.99
LaCie d2 Quadra 1TB eSata/FW800/FW400/USB2 External Drive	1	151.98	151.98
	Shipping		0.00
	Total		1121.42

Now it’s time to revisit a few of my main goals for this project and see how this NAS fits into the overall strategy.  From my original post…

• Incorporate Time Machine backups
• Identify super important things that need multiple backups (e.g. backup to disk and DVD or online backup)
• Network sharing – this is rather low on the list. As I said before, I only do real computing on one machine (to avoid syncing multiple machines), but with Apple TV and the rumored Apple Tablet… hmmm

Based on those three objectives, I’ve put together a high-level strategy and you can see the NAS is right in the middle of it:

In the next few posts I’ll talk about specific parts of the strategy and how I technically implement them.

Shameless plug—The diagram above was created using OmniGraffle and my Architecture by Hand stencil.

Related posts:

1. My FreeNAS Project Part 3: The Build
2. My FreeNAS Project Part 2: The Parts
3. My FreeNAS Project Part 5: The Config

At this point, I went headless with my NAS.  I won’t need a monitor connected anymore because I won’t need console access for the remainder of configuration and operation.  I tucked my NAS box in my entertainment center in my bedroom.

Configure the Array

Next I added the disks and built the RAID array.  Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to use FreeNAS’ software RAID rather than the RAID controller on my motherboard.  The first step is to add your disks.  You do this from the Disks->Management menu in the FreeNAS web interface.  Again, the documentation on FreeNAS.org is sufficient to step through this process.

When adding my disks, I chose to set the “Hard disk standby time” to 60 minutes.  I’m using my NAS as a raw storage device  (backup and archive) rather than an active working device, so allowing the disks to spin down after 60 minutes of inactivity will save power and keep the drives cool.  I also set the “Advanced Power Management” option to “Level 1 – Minimum power usage with Standby (spindown).”  Again, to keep power consumption low and the drives cool.  I activated the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring on all of my drives so I could use the reporting features and monitor the temperature of the drives.

Because of the case I chose to stuff my NAS into, as you can tell, I’m most worried about heat.  Typically NAS cases are small towers with stacked drives with efficient airflow from front to back.  There are also minimal components inside, so there’s not a lot of additional heat created.  My case—as you saw from prior posts—is a media center case with the guts of a full computer.  Keeping a hard drive cool can extend the life of the drive, so to help me monitor this, I setup the S.M.A.R.T. reporting features under Disks->Management S.M.A.R.T. tab.  I set the “Difference” value to 5°C and the “Critical” value to 36°C.  This means if a single drive’s temperature rises 5° or more since the last polling (which I set to 5 minutes) or if any of the drives reach 36°C, I will receive an email notification.  Be sure to click the checkbox to activate the email report and set the destination email address at the bottom of the page.

After adding each disk in your array, you’ll format the disks, create the RAID5 using the disks you added and format the new RAID array (I used UFS file system).  The FreeNAS.org documents explain how to do each step.

With four 1TB drives added to my RAID5 configuration, it took FreeNAS approximately six hours to build the volume.  This created a volume of 2.6TB of usable storage space.  If you’re building your own NAS and wondering how much usable storage you’ll get from different RAID configurations, check out RAIDCalc.

After the RAID was initialized I created a mount point (Disks->Mount Point).  The mount point presents the volume to the operating system and makes the disk available for use.  Don’t confuse this with a share (CIFS or SMB), which makes a disk or directory available to other computers on your network.

Sharing the NAS

The last few steps to a functioning NAS is making it available to other computers on your network.  On my network I have a couple Macs, a couple Windows machines and an Ubuntu virtual machine.  The easiest way to share disks in this environment is to enable the CIFS/SMB service (Services->CIFS/SMB).  For authentication, I’m using Local Users since I do not have a LDAP server running on my network.  I gave the box a NetBIOS name, set the Workgroup and description, but left the rest of the settings as defaults.

I created one share (Services->CIFS/SMB, Share tab) to the root mount point just to verify everything was working.  However, before I could test and since I’m using Local Users for authentication, I added myself as a user (Access->Users and Groups).  I then went over to my MacBook Pro and sure enough, my NAS box was listed under the Shared section in the Finder window.  I clicked the server and could see my NAS01 share.

Benchmarking the NAS

I plugged my MacBook Pro into my new gigabit router (I bought a new router specifically to get more I/O out of the NAS) and performed a couple of benchmark tests (images below).  And so we have a functioning FreeNAS installation with 2.6TB of usable storage space.

Protecting the NAS

The last thing I needed to do before starting to use the NAS for production is protect it from power events.

Power outages, surges, and brown outs are deadly for storage devices.  If the unit loses power in the middle of a write to disk, you can potentially lose your RAID.  Enterprise-level storage devices have built-in protections against these events, but lower-level storage devices do not.

I purchased an APC Back-UPS XS 900 from Best Buy for $129.99.  This unit is sufficient to run the NAS and another workstation for about an hour on battery.  If I’m around during a power event, that’s plenty of time to gracefully shutdown the NAS to prevent trouble from a sudden power loss.  But I’m not around all of the time.  Fortunately, FreeNAS has a built-in UPS service.  Once connected to your UPS device (via a USB cable that comes with the UPS), it can react to power events.  Under Services->UPS, you can enable this UPS service.  I couldn’t find the driver for my exact model of APC, so I used the generic “usbhid-ups” driver.  I also couldn’t find any specific help for the port setting, but I ran across a post on an Ubuntu forum that used “auto” as the port, so I tried that.  I set the “Shutdown mode” to “UPS goes on battery” and the “Shutdown timer” to 30 seconds.  In a power outage and after 30 seconds on battery the NAS will initiate a graceful shutdown.  I tested this by yanking the power cord on the UPS, and to my delight, FreeNAS shut itself down.

In the next post I’ll review the entire parts list and then talk about where this FreeNAS project fits into my over all backup/archive strategy.

Related posts:

1. My FreeNAS Project Part 1: Introduction
2. My FreeNAS Project Part 3: The Build
3. My FreeNAS Project Part 6: Final Build and Overview

There are really good tutorials on how to install FreeNAS, including the documentation on FreeNAS.org.  I don’t think it’s necessary for me to recreate the wheel here, but I would like to walk through a couple points that I feel need additional commentary.

You probably won’t, but read the docs

I encourage you to read through the documentation on FreeNAS.org.  If you’re like me, you’ll zoom past the requirements and introductions and go straight to the meat of the matter.  Well, by doing so you’ll also bypass some very important information that may save you time, such as the use of the term “LiveCD.”

Aside:  I think the semantics used on the FreeNAS.org download page are a bit misleading.  To me, LiveCD has a different connotation altogether and “install disk” is not one of them. But this LiveCD does indeed contain the installation needed if you are going to install to a hard drive, USB or Compact Flash card.  The documentation explains this.

There are two options to install FreeNAS—LiveCD and IMG.  Do not bother with the IMG file if your NAS machine has a CD drive.  You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache and time.  This is especially true if you’re using a Mac because the IMG file is not recognized by Apple’s Disk Utility application.  I even purchased Toast 10 specifically because it says it can handle IMG files.  It can not handle this one. Installation from the LiveCD is the only supported option.

Verbose is your friend

When you boot from the LiveCD, the first screen you’ll encounter is the boot loader.  You have five seconds to make a choice before the system starts with the default boot option.  Choose the option to boot with verbose logging (option 4 at time of this writing).  This may save you some time, especially if you built your machine from scratch.  The verbose mode will tell you exactly what’s happening as the operating system loads.  This information can help you identify potential problems with your system.  In my case, when I first booted the LiveCD it was stuck on a status and I didn’t understand what it was doing.  I assumed it froze so I kept rebooting.  Turns out it was having an issue “calibrating clocks” and I still don’t know what that means, but at least I knew it was trying to do something and to wait it out.

Secure Your NAS

You can take some very simple steps to secure your new FreeNAS installation.  First, change the admin password.  It defaults to “freenas” so go into System->General and click the Password tab to set a new one.  And when I say change, I mean don’t make it your dog’s name or your first born’s birth date.  Use lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers and at least one punctuation mark.  Try to create a password of at least ten characters.

While you’re in the System->General area, change the port of the WebGUI.  Use HTTPS protocol if you’re going to expose your FreeNAS to the outside world.

Stick your FreeNAS box behind a firewall (or router du jour).  Make sure your router has the latest firmware installed and no ports are forwarding that you don’t know exactly what they are and why they are forwarding.  While you’re at it, turn off UPnP in your router’s configuration.

Be Informed

FreeNAS has very good options to notify you of its health.  It does so using email that you can configure in the System->Advanced menu then on the Email tab.  Again, be secure when possible and use a mail server with SSL authentication.  If your FreeNAS box is configured to reach the internet, you can use any of the free web-based mail hosts to send emails.  With smart phones (like an iPhone), you can get really creative about how your FreeNAS notifies you of events.

Once your email is setup and tested, go to Status->Email Report tell FreeNAS to send you a daily report.  I receive a report each morning at 7am.  I’m mostly interested in the health of the drives, so I use the System Info, System Log and the S.M.A.R.T log (but you have to enable S.M.A.R.T enabled on each drive attached to FreeNAS).

Overall the FreeNAS installation is really simple.  There’s really not much to it.  Next we’ll talk about configuring your array and some other services that I’ve started using.

Related posts:

1. My FreeNAS Project Part 3: The Build
2. My FreeNAS Project Part 5: The Config
3. My FreeNAS Project Part 2: The Parts

The first step was to disassemble the donor machine, which wasn’t a problem at all.  The breakdown was smooth with only one trip to HP’s support site to figure out how an interlocking part became not so locking.

Next, I installed the motherboard into the new case.  It wasn’t that big of a deal; however, the HP motherboard was fastened to a metal mounting plate and I had to decide whether to keep the HP mount or ditch it.  I wanted to scrap it, but realized the CPU heat-sink and fan were mounted to the metal plate, so that decision was made for me.  This created a tighter fit than I expected, but in the end turned out to be a very solid.

My next task was to get some power in the case, so I proceeded to install the 460W power supply from the donor.  And that’s when I encountered my first hiccup.  I didn’t think to measure the power supply to make sure it would fit in the new case—a standard ATX case—and I assumed, stupidly, that the power supply from the HP was of an ATX form-factor.  Needless to say, it was not.  I don’t even know what you call the form-factor, but it’s height is 97mm high, which is too tall for a standard ATX (86 mm).

It was time to break out the wallet again.  At this point I’m thinking the cost of this build is going to get out of hand.  Instead of ordering a power supply online and saving some money, I wanted instant gratification.  I headed over to Best Buy and picked up a BFG 550W GX Modular Power Supply for $89.99 + tax.  It turned out to be a very nice piece.  It’s modular cable system means the power cables can be plugged in as necessary, to avoid a nest of unnecessary wires.  It’s a sleek design with a huge fan on the bottom.  It fit nicely in the case.  My only real complaint is that the cables are difficult to corral which makes cable management a bit difficult in a tight space.

At this point I began making connections to the motherboard.  I hate this part.  Every motherboard and case have different sets of connectors for things like the power button, the reset switch and the power/HDD LEDs.  It’s slightly worse with the donor board because it had an all-in-one front control panel that was a single plug.  I had to do a bit of trial-and-error to figure out which pins were what to get the switches and LEDs working.

I proceeded to install the rest of the components—the graphics card, the FireWire 400/800 card, the DVD drive, the four SATA drives and the IDE-to-CF adapter for the Compact Flash card.  The hard drive placement was a bit tricky.  Even though the case has four 3.5″ bays, they are configured in such a way that three drives are stacked directly on top of each other and the fourth bay is tucked away under the optical drive bay.  I decided I would space them out and use the second 5.25″ bay above the optical drive to house one of the drives.  This would allow for slightly better cooling.  Once I had everything connected, I powered it on and to my delight everything was functioning.

Next I needed to configure the RAID controller.  As previously mentioned, I made the decision to run RAID5 which the controller handled; however, the controller had a maximum volume limit of 2TB, which means I had to create two separate volumes to present to FreeNAS.  This was not desirable as I wanted one big aggregate.  I searched for information on this controller and in process learned that the built-in Intel 82801GR/GH RAID controller was not a great RAID controller.  So I made a decision to use FreeNAS’ software RAID instead.  I set the disks back to an un-RAIDed configuration.

My next chore was to install the FreeNAS system to verify the disks before I tightened everything up.  I downloaded the FreeNAS LiveCD ISO as well as the embedded IMG, unsure which I’d use.  I started with the LiveCD, burned the ISO to a CD and popped it in the  DVD drive.  The machine booted to the FreeNAS boot loader screen.  I proceeded with the default boot option.  FreeNAS started to load and then froze.  I made an incorrect assumption that the CD didn’t work and proceeded to waste two hours trying to figure out how to load the IMG file onto the Compact Flash card.  After failing to find anything that worked, I returned to the LiveCD.  This time I let the machine boot and left it alone while I took a fifteen minute break.

When I came back to the machine, to my surprise, FreeNAS had loaded and I was presented the install option.  When the install was finished I removed the CD and rebooted the machine.  The first indication that something wasn’t right was the boot loader didn’t countdown from five seconds and automatically boot with defaults.  Instead it hung on that screen waiting for user input.  I chose the default boot option and after a few lines of boot information, the machine froze.  I rebooted again and chose the boot option with verbose output so I could see what was going on.  It was hanging on the line “Calibrating clocks…”  At this point I thought there was a BIOS problem, so I booted into BIOS setup and noticed the clock was not holding the time.  I set the time and then booted back into FreeNAS.  Again, I let the machine sit for a while and it finally booted up.  I decided to continue with the setup just to verify the disks and such and come back to the boot problem later.

So I setup the RAID and FreeNAS started initializing the array.  But there was another problem.  From all of the tutorials I read, upon creating and initializing the array, the status will change to “REBUILDING”.  Mine didn’t.  It was stuck on “Initializing.”  I let it be for quite a few minutes and came back and it was still initializing.  At this point I was so frustrated that I called it a night but left it running.

The next morning I returned to FreeNAS and it was still initializing the array.  I decided to reboot the machine and this time it booted up perfectly without any delay.  I have no idea why, but hell, one less thing to try to debug.  I deleted the RAID and started over.  This time it worked and started rebuilding the array.  I’ll explain how I configured and setup FreeNAS in the next post.

Once the array was built I started testing it, keeping a close eye on the temperature of the disks as I knew cooling would be an issue with the case and the way I had to arrange the drives.  Under some duress, the second (bottom of the 3.5″ bay) and fourth drive (under the optical drive) temperatures started rising above the typical 35°C.  I went to the computer store to pick up an additional fan.  I placed the fan next to the front intake fan and positioned it to blow across the drives to get some cool air on the two drives that needed it.  There’s an exhaust vent on the other side of the case which helps because the added fan blows cool air across the drives and the heat out of the vent on the other side.  This addition brought the drive temperatures down below 35°C.

I took everything apart again to route the cables.  Cable management is a skill that I do not possess.  Some techs build machines meticulously with perfectly tidy and clean cable management regardless of how much stuff is crammed inside the box.  That is not me.  I did my best to clean it up.  It’s not great, but not terrible…at least that’s my subjective opinion.  Once I got the cables cleaned up I plugged the NAS in and booted it to make sure it all still  worked.  In process I ended up frying the Compact Flash card.  It most likely shorted out because it was resting on top of the optical drive. I had another 2GB card from my camera and so I used that.  Without a proper place to put the IDE-to-CF adapter, I tucked it down away from metal parts.  This was not an ideal solution, but the best I could do without re-engineering the placement of everything.

So now the build is complete.  Of course having to replace the Compact Flash card meant I had to reinstall FreeNAS, which I did and will discuss in the next post.  Here are a few photos of the finished product.  All in all, it was a very frustrating build, but the end result turned out quite nice.

Related posts:

1. My FreeNAS Project Part 4: The Install
2. My FreeNAS Project Part 2: The Parts
3. My FreeNAS Project Part 6: Final Build and Overview

Like I said in my last post, the reason to build this is to understand my solution and learn something.  Additionally, aesthetically I want this to look more like a stereo component than a box on my desk or another computer tower on the floor.  So on to the parts list.

I should mention now that I was not trying to build this cheaper than an off-the-shelf NAS.  So if you’re going to do this and money is an issue, I’d strongly advise just ordering a pre-built NAS from an online store.  You’ll probably save money and tons of time (which is money) and frustration. While I did do a little bit of comparison shopping, I ended up ordering most of the parts from Amazon to take advantage of Amazon Prime shipping (free 2-day shipping).

If you have an old or unused computer (of the wintel variety), that’s a good place to start your build.  I acquired an unused HP xw4400 workstation for free with the following specs:

• Intel motherboard w/ NH82801GR/SL8FY chipset:
  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.8 GHz, 800 MHz front-side bus, 2MB L2 cache
  • 1.5 GB RAM (DDR2/667MHz)
  • 82801GR/GH SATA RAID controller w/ 4 SATA ports
  • Gigabit Ethernet
• A dual port video card
• DVD optical drive (only needed for install)
• 80GB SATA disk (not needed)
• 460W Power Supply, Chassis Fan and SATA cable

That’s plenty of hardware for a FreeNAS build which requires a minimum of only 128MB RAM.  So now to fill the hardware gaps…

I want my NAS solution to look more like a stereo component than a typical computer or NAS device.  I bought a SilverStone LC10S Aluminum Front Panel ATX/Micro ATX Computer Case (Silver) for $85.49.  It has four 3.5″ bays to hold the hard drives, but cooling may become an issue even though it has front and rear chassis fans.

Next, instead of using a spinning hard drive to boot the FreeNAS operating system, I found this link which utilizes a Compact Flash card as the boot disk. This is a good solution because a normal hard drive can fail and uses more power and generates more heat.  You can also boot from the LiveCD or a USB keychain drive.  FreeNAS basically loads the operating system into RAM and only needs a writable drive to store configuration files.   In order to get the BIOS to recognize the Compact Flash card, I’d also need an IDE-to-CF adapter.  I bought the Syba Ultra Adapter Dual IDE 40/44PIN To Compact Flash for $13.98 and the smallest, cheapest Compact Flash card I could find in two minutes, TRANSCEND 2GB Compact Flash Card for $17.29.  2GB is way overkill considering FreeNAS only needs 32MB, but whatever, I was in a meeting when I ordered these two parts!

The hard drives that I’ll use in a RAID5 configuration were the easiest parts to select.  I went with the Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Hard Drive 3.5″ for $79.99 each.  I ordered five of them—four will be used in the array and one will be a spare that I’ll keep in case I encounter a drive failure.  I went with the WD Caviar Green because it’s an efficient drive that uses less power and runs cool and quiet. To connect the drives, I got three Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches) at $9.00 each. The fourth cable is from the donor machine.

To handle the removable drive component of my plan, I needed to get a FireWire card since the Intel motherboard from the donor machine does not have FireWire built-in.  It does have built-in USB, which will be handy, but I wanted a bit more speed for the replication. I got the Allegro 3PORT Firewire 400/800 Pci Card for $64.78.

Here’s the list of the components with totals:

Component	Quantity	Price	Total
Donor Machine: Intel chipset w/ Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 460W Power Supply, DVD optical drive, GigE, 4x SATA RAID	1	0.00	0.00
SilverStone LC10S Aluminum Front Panel ATX/Micro ATX Computer Case (Silver)	1	85.49	85.49
Syba Ultra Adapter Dual IDE 40/44PIN To Compact Flash	1	13.98	13.98
Allegro 3PORT Firewire 400/800 Pci Card	1	64.78	64.78
TRANSCEND 2GB Compact Flash Card	1	17.29	17.29
Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Hard Drive 3.5″	5	79.99	399.95
Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches)	3	9.00	27.00
		Shipping	0.00
		Total	$608.49

So there’s the parts list we need for the build.  Next up, I’ll build this thing.  Stay tuned…

Links

• FreeNAS.org
• Geeky Projects – Build your own NAS using FreeNAS

Related posts:

1. My FreeNAS Project Part 3: The Build
2. My FreeNAS Project Part 6: Final Build and Overview
3. My FreeNAS Project Part 1: Introduction