TechLife.tv
Its Not A Hobbie, Its A Way Of Life
Finally, an update
Feb 15th
It has been a long while since I’ve posted. The main reason has been I wasn’t happy with the design of the site, and I didn’t feel like I could post from anywhere. I spent this long weekend fixing the things that bugged me and here we are. I’ve got updates to my Mini-ITX FreeNAS experience, which I’ll write up and post ASAP.
Some of the new improvements I’ve made include a live twitter feed and an iPhone / mobile phone friendly version. I’ll also be able to post from anywhere through an iPhone app. I was considering moving everything to squarespace.com to get some these features, but that would involve a lot of design time.
So here it is. This should keep me motivated to keep posting.
Windows 7 for $49? Not so fast
Jun 26th
With Microsoft, there’s always a catch.
Eager to take advatage of the $49 pre-order price tag of Windows 7, I hopped on over to Amazon.com to buy a copy. That’s when I realized the truth.
It’s the upgrade disc, not the full install.
You will need an existing copy of Windows XP or Vista installed on your computer in order to even use the $49 disc. Ask any computer professional, and they will tell you - using an upgrade disc is NOT how you should be upgrading your Windows OS. ALWAYS format and start from scratch.
If you want a nice shiney clean installation of Windows 7, you’ll have to shell out $199 US for the retail version for that priviledge.
Only customers that don’t know any better will be getting the upgrade disc. The market MS should be targeting are the IT professionals, and with this marketing “gotchya”, the pros are just going to wait for the OEM version. Bucket o’ fail Microsoft.
Mini-ITX RAID5, finally!
Jun 22nd
Ever since I built my Mini-ITX Smoothwall router two years ago, I’ve been searching for a Raid5 Mini-ITX solution that doesn’t involve a $150-$400 PCI RAID card, as most of them won’t fit into ITX cases. Well today, I stumbled across the solution!
Logic Supply now carries RAID5 daughter boards for most of their Jetaway motherboards. This also just happens to be the same board type I bought for building the smoothie. I added a 3x 10/100/1000 NIC as the daughtercard, which I could easily change over to this RAID5 daughtercard.
If you’re starting from scratch, here’s the parts list to build your own Mini-ITX RAID5 NAS:
Jetway J7F2WE-1G2 Mini-ITX Mainboard – $169
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/j7f2we_1g2
Jetway 4x SATA Add-On Module with RAID Support (Marvell 88SE6145-TFE1) – $39
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/adpe4s
Emphase 40-pin Industrial Flash Disk Module 1 GB – $29
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/fdm40xdi1g
Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis – $205
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/es34069
Add to this:
- any four 3.5″ SATA hard drives of your choosing
- 1Gb of DDR2 RAM
- load er up with FreeNAS.
Welcome to RAID5 MiniITX bliss.
I’m still working through the how I’m going to put this into production with the hardware I currently have around the house, but eventually I’d like to:
- Convert my Smoothie into this FreeNAS box
- Use FreeNAS as an iSCSI target
- Load up ESXi on my current server hardware and point the storage volume to the FreeNAS iSCSI target
- Install pfsense as my router in a VM.
- Toy around with other VMs and ESXi to my heart’s content!
Downside? I loose the PC aspect of my server. It’s currently hooked up to my HDTV for watching MKVs & HD podcasts. Anyone know if you can output a VM’s video to an HDTV?
Microsoft vs. Apple
Jun 12th
I know this topic is overly discussed in the tech world, but I wanted to post a very short phrase from a Gizmodo article.
Exchange Support
Snow Leopard’s got it built-in, your copy of Windows 7 doesn’t. Freaky but true.
It’s decisions like that that prove Microsoft doesn’t understand the software business at all. Its why Apple has a strangle hold on the music, and now cell phone market.
Microsoft makes scalable infrastructure products. Apple picks up the slack everywhere else.
Microsoft to drop application limit from Windows 7 Starter
May 22nd
Paul Thorrott from winsupersite.com is reporting that Microsoft will be dropping the three application limit previously reported going into the Windows 7 start edition. This edition is geared to replace Windows XP on netbooks (and in general, cause lets face it, who really uses Vista?). In his post, he mentions a limitation that’s still in place – the inability to change the desktop background photo.
I agree with Paul on this one. The ability to personalize my future netbook, with Windows 7 Starter, is more important than limiting the OS to running only three applications at the same time.
