mattopia

1. You’re infected. Your top 8 has the cure. One must die. Who?
matt will never read this. he’s gone.

11/Sep/2007 09:19:19 INIT: Bye bye: I’m becoming a daemon…

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.

movie night, as expected, was a blast!!  the two surprise movies were:

ghostbusters
ferris bueller’s day off

movies were prefixed with re-cut movie trailers dug up on youtube, including "scary mary" and "shining". 

in other news, on the day i was born, the pina colada song was the billboard #1 song.

movie night is tomorrow, saturday the 30th!!

same location as last year — dad’s barn.  i sent an e-mail with more details to everyone i could think of that i had e-mail addresses for.  if you didn’t get it, that means i don’t have a current e-mail for you, so make a note in the comments if you need directions or info!

mattopian productions presents…

movie night oh seven

yes kids, i’ve talked about it before.  i’ve thought about it.  i’ve reminisced.  but this time, i’ve planned…

what:  three movies, back to back, on a ~20′ (yes, foot) screen
where:  on the side of dad’s barn, port clinton, oh.  (contact for directions)
when: june 30th, 2007 at dusk.  new york. present.  in space. long ago.
why:  because it’s totaly bitchin’
who:  me and all of you

there will be beer and "r" rated topics, so no young’uns.

the movie schedule is….

movie 1: the big lebowski (1998 / 117 min)
movie 2: surprise (19xx / 116 min)
movie 3: surprise (19xx / tba)

yes, there will indeed be two surprise movies this time.  trust me, they’re good.  you’ll like them.

please rsvp in comments, via phone, email, tcp over avian carrier, whatever.

and remember…  it’s the place to be!

i think obama just won my vote…

my first computer was one of these — the tandy trs-80 color computer 2.

it was decked out with a tape drive for loading games and programs.  think of the load times for the original playstation, and multiply by 50.

i think i eventually got a disk drive for it as well, at which point i gladly chucked the tape reader out the window.

after a few years, the trash 80 was boxed up in favor of my apple //gs. 

wow, i should make a list of all of the computers i’ve owned.  there would be dozens.

oh, and happy easter!

every once in awhile i google my name to see what’s out there.  doing so recently brought me to a myspace page (ugh) for my graduating high school class.  it’s over here.

i hate to say, it made me spend a few minutes making my profile say something other than "myspace sux."

(i still have no idea how i even ended up with a myspace account.)

i rather enjoyed apple’s iphone commercial:

hello.

it includes people answering phones from dozens of tv shows and movies, including a clip from two of my all-time, top five favorite movies (and there’s a reference to one of them) – high fidelity and the big lebowski.  i think the michael j. fox one is from back to the future, but i’m not certain on that one.

can you identify any of the others?