i’ve always been a do-it-yourselfer, at least when it comes to anything tech. i built my first computer. and my second, third, fourth, and so on. i’ve built file servers and routers out of old hardware running linux. hell, i more or less built an ISP from the ground up with $40 second hand desktop P.C.’s.
i was a tinkerer. but not anymore.
it all started with an open source package called m0n0wall. it’s a very feature-rich f***bsd based firewall with a pretty web gui. i run it on a small embedded device, and i love it. it does everything i need it to do.
the alternative? put a linux (or bsd du jour) box together, use a CF or USB device so that there are no moving parts to fail, build firewall rules, yadda, ugh.
fast forward to my mac mini. it works, and i love it. the home-brew windows box that has been upgraded a dozen times but never replaced? it’s in the basement acting as a file server for a 400 gig usb drive.
why do i mention all of this? well, a few months back i decided to step back to my "diy" roots. you see, i’m in a bit of a storage pinch. my various data (tv shows, pr0n, mp3’s, etc) is scattered all over the place, with zero redundancy. to correct this, i bought three 500 gig drives from the greatest store on earth. i would build a simple linux box using hardware i have laying around, use software raid plus the greatest volume manager in the world, and a few keystrokes later i’d have a terabyte of raid-y goodness for my precious data.
newegg, as always, had the drives in my hands within about two days. i paid for second day delivery, of course, so i could be up and running by the weekend.
the drives sat in their bubble wrap for over a month…
then shanon comes over, and we decide to do it up geek style with some raid buildin’.
my power supply has no sata power connectors. shanon and i run all over town, and don’t find any adaptors. (well, we find some, but the place was closed. story for another day.)
defeated, we go on to better things (beer perhaps).
i do eventually get some sata power adaptor cables, which sit in plastic bags next to the still-shrinkwrapped drives.
fast forward a month or two, and i have some actual free time. i decide to spend it getting this terabyte array built. i already have a linux box that hasn’t been doing anything lately (it was running my asterisk voip stuff until that broke, another diy failure). since most of the bits are there, i decide i can pop the sata controller and drives in, set the raid and lvm up, and be done.
of course, the case has insufficient mouting drives for the 3 drives and the pre-existing drive containing the operating system. this is ok, as the bottom of computer cases are ideal for drives to sit unmounted. i can worry about "properly" mounting the drives later.
linux sees the drives, the array and lvm stuff goes together perfectly, and i’m done. well, i better download the latest updates for my linux distro. after a reboot, the o/s drive that was already in the machine fails, leaving my spanky new array completely inaccessible.
so. fucking. close.
fast forward to last night. i have zero disk space across the board. i either need to delete some pr0n, or get this array built.
i never delete pr0n.
determined, i go to the basement, deciding that i can be creative and load the o/s onto the array itself without a separate o/s drive. i try, try, try, and after 6 installation attempts i give up.
tonight downloaded "freenas" and burned the iso, which doesn’t boot in the machine.
at this point, i’ve put probably 15 precious hours into this project with absolutely nothing to show for it. all i wanted was more storage.
i thought it would be cheap and fun to put this array together myself, but it’s been nothing but frustrating. it doesn’t help that my job is to deal with this kind of stuff all day, making linux tinkering even less appealing when i get home at night.
i’m ordering one of these. rest in piece, diy matt.
A Eulogy
I remember working with DIY Matt to build a Red Hat box to do some routing for that fledgling wireless ISP. It was a fun time to be a tinkerer. The possibilities seemed endless, and we were the sort of people who were going to make great things happen.
DIY Matt did make great things happen, time and time again. His passing is most unfortunate. He will be honored and missed. I hope that perhaps a little of him will live on in all of us.
Rest in piece, my old friend.
Very cool video for the Drobo!
From Tinkerer Matt to Gadget Master Matt…
another router tested on the blog of matt…man, i forgot the DSL password and that was an hour of messing around…but other than that, I now have 54 mps…and, I, too, have pretty much stopped tinkering…although I did put an MPEG card in the desktop and have been using with GP-PVR for a few years now…
i seem to remember mentioning something about setting up a hardware raid, but a linux raid would be easier… 😛
Funny.. im in the process of building a ~2 TB storage array, however im kinda taking my time with it just arrived, a nice shiny 5 bay sata hot swap cage $100 on the greatest store on earth, however im kinda piecing this thing together waiting on buying mobo proc and ram next, then drives hopefully by the time i get around to buying the drives and building the system 750’s will drop to where 500’s are now, and freebsd 7 will be out cheers to zfs
i have a few pf sense boxes at several clients locations, all on rackmounted hardware… makes a awesome router solution in my opinion replaced a few snap gears, linksys, and sonic walls with them.
Though i do miss the ghetto-ness of some of those projects 😉
My personal DIY projects have really slowed too. Lately I blame WoW for it, and working for the Geek Squad doesn’t give me much time off at all. I always read that the “genius factor” slowed or stopped when you get married and sadly I’m finding they are right. I’ve always built my own boxes but my file server up here hasn’t been turned on in weeks and a a couple other IT projects that are in various states of incompleteness scattered about.
I will say that I have a high success rate now with vintage audio gear repair. I have a nearly rebuilt, sweet ass, tube amplified stereo/turntable cabinet that will be done by the time our new house is. I’ve actually made a few bucks on the side fixing some gear for other people now :o) Rarely I get to do something fun at work but not often, at least I’m getting paid sitting here right now.
travis – i’m working on a technics sl-b2 i found on craigslist for $10. picked up a grado black cartridge and some new belts, but i’m having a hell of a time “properly” aligning the cartridge, setting vta, etc. care to help?
all — the concept of spending $500 on the drobo (as bad ass is it is) pushed me to revive diy matt for one last project. after about a dozen re-tries and tring a different motherboard, i finally got something that works. it’s based on freenas, which in turn is based on freebsd. freenas boots from cd-rom and then reads a config file from a usb flash drive, which allows the 3 drives to be 100% used for data in a raid-5 configuration.
it’s mildly ghetto, and lack of proper mounting hardware means the 3 sata drives are sitting on the workbench next to the box they’re connected to. but it works.
i already have the array like 70% full, thanks to ripping all of my cd’s to apple lossless and continuing my pr0n and tv show downloading.
congrats on owning a board that is capable of booting off of the cd-rom… now that your pii is bummimg you out, i might recommend using a mainboard (p4 or above) that can actually boot off of a usb drive… obviously, from there you would not need a cd-rom or hd-drive. acquiring such a board may or may not mean the end of diy matt… but i’m pretty sure that you would not have to hear, “fuck you!” from joe. i think that that would make it worth not having an actual hd in your netstorage… that and the tb and a half of storage.