Workstations

This guide is about how to setup probably any ReadyNAS device to act as a NIS/YP client. NIS/YP is a protocol that shares account information accross the network. In such an environment it is important that the ReadyNAS knows about all Linux and Windows account, so it can keep access rights on files in sync. If users had different numerical IDs on Linux clients and on the ReadyNAS, all files created from these clients wouldn't beb accessible on Windows machines any more, because the ReadyNAS wouldn't know which account the files belong to.

On Windows there is already a powerful solution, called Active Directory. This is already supported on the ReadyNAS, but there is no support for the corresponding UNIX protocol, which is NIS. Having a central account authority which manages both Windows and Linux accounts via Active Directory and NIS is very helpful in such mixed environments.

I really like my ReadyNAS server - small, slick, multifunctional and superb support.

But there are two things missing: more drive bays and a more powerful CPU. But apparently the first point is being addressed with a ReadyNAS Pro device with 6 bays, as seen on CES 2008. I hope, they also spent a more powerful CPU to the device, so it will be able to outperform the Thecus devices. Those are a lot faster, but the firmware and support seems to be really bad.

Can't wait to get my hands on the ReadyNAS Pro!

According to ars technica, Bill Gates showed off his newest product, the Windows Home Server as part of his keynote last Sunday at the CES. The WHS is a small device intended to be the central server for home users for storing their photos, music etc. Paul Thurrot has a small preview of this server and a hardware implementation done by HP (Microsoft only delviers the operating system). On OSNews there has been a debate for the need of such a product.

I predict that the Windows Home Server will be a big success for Microsoft, and I will try to elaborate on the reasons: Nowadays we live in the so called "information age", that is after industrialisation, information is the new driving force in out culture. More and more people have have multiple computers at home (you do not want to know how many I own) and other electronic devices like digital cameras, media players, digital video recorders etc are already standard equipment in many households.

This means that digital content and properties replace traditional values in our life. This also means there is a new need for protection of your personal investments - ten years ago, you could mainly lose your possesions in terms of a physical loss. Nowadays more and more important and valuable data is stored on various computers at each home. This imposes two problems: First you want a centralized storage for all your digital data (photos, movies, music, documents etc), and second you want a secure backup of all your data. Many people become increasingly aware of the first problem, but the second is the really important one. In former times, you only lost part of your values if - for example - a CD got scratches or was stolen.

But nowadays if your harddisc crashes, you probably will lose a lot of irretrievable data like your private email etc. So you wish that you had a backup of all your data, or even better a centralized storage that is protected against hardware faults by some redundancy.

These are just the reasons why a home server makes sense for a lot of people today. One can argue that there are already a lot of good and affordable NAS boxes out there, but most of them are not more than simple NAS boxes (one exception would be Infrants product reportoire) that don't offer comfortable backup utilities or are too complicated for the average user. This is why I see espceially Windows Home Server to be a success - if done right and with the help of Microsofts massive marketing forces.

For me, I probably won't buy a Windows Home Server, because I want something more professional - I want to have a blindingly fast RAID server with tons of storage, support for different file protocols (NFS comes to my mind), although the hardware specs of HPs machien are promising: 1.8 GHz AMD Sempron paired with 512MB of RAM. This should offer twice the performance of Thecus N5200 NAS solution, which is already by far the fastest affordable home NAS out there (although with many firmware limitations and problems).

Currently I am thinking of replacing my (rather new) ReadyNAS NAS server by a more powerful self-built server. Although the ReadyNAS is a very nice device with very good support from Infrant, it is still too slow for storing all remotely mounted user directories for my Linux and Mac box. Plus I am thinking of using a iSCSI volume for all user directories on my Windows box.

My ideal server would contain an Areca SATA controller with 16 channels and 15 disks in hot-swap carriers running in a RAID-6 plus one or two fast gigabit controllers. So much for the hardware.

But another important aspect is the software of course. Currently I would opt for OpenFiler as operating system for the server. OpenFiler is based on Linux and supports all features I want, except for efficient snapshots. Snapshots are a wonderful thing, they allow to keep an old state of a file-system without the need to do an explicit backup (although one still should backup ones data because of the risk of hardware faults). OpenFiler implements these snapshots using LVM (Logical Volume Manager), which in turn implements snapshots on a Copy-on-Write base. This snapshot implementation has two main drawbacks:

• You have to allocate space for the snapshot on your disks.


• The more snapshots you have, the slower gets your system .

And this is exactly the point where Suns filesystem ZFS comes in. ZFS also supports snapshots, but as it seems in a much more efficient way. You do not need to preallocate space for the snapshot and it seems that there is no performance penality by using them. So I'd love to use ZFS together with OpenFiler - but ZFS currently is only available in Solaris with a Linux port under the way. But I guess it will take more time for the Linux port to finish and to be integrated into OpenFiler than I want to wait with my new NAS server.

Snapshots really are the reasons why everyone wants ZFS on Linux. Okay, at least this is my personal top reasons why I want to see it soon. Or a port of OpenFiler to Solaris

Recently I got hands on an SGI Fuel, and I plan to use it for development (as soon as I ported my project to Linux - in other words, it will take a while). The Fuel offers some standard 64bit PCI expansion slots, and even supports some standard PCI cards. You can find a list of (inofficially) supported cards at Nekochan.

For myself, first I installed an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 card, which runs out-of-the-box. The next step was to install a gigabit ethernet card, as I have all my home directories stored on a central NAS Raid server. But this was not so easy, because of two problems: First the number of supported gigabit cards is rather low (and they are expensive), and they only work with a small kernel hack. But finally I got my hands onto two Compaq NC7770 Gigabit Server Adapter for 19EUR each. I installed one of the cards into my Fuel and followed the hacking instructions again found at Nekochan.

Now I have working a cheap but powerful gigabit ethernet card in my Fuel, the same trick should also work on an Octane with a PCI card cage and an Origin. Maybe I will try to install the second card into my O200 some time.

Yellowtab finally made a demo version of their operating system called Zeta available for download. You can get the CD-image from Freenet (unfortunately the page is in German, but it shouldn't be too hard to download the file).

Zeta is based on BeOS, the famous operating system designed by Jean Louis Gasse which turns even old hardware into fast computers. But I have to admit my opinion about Zeta is ambivalent, especially the German BeOS community is very fanatic, even they can hardly oversee the many mistakes Yellowtab has made in the past.

Anyway, try out the OS and decide if you are willing to pay ~100EUR for the full version. I already bought the full version as an early adaptor, but I was disappointed and I am not using it very often any more.

As many people know, Apple didn't develop Mac OS X from scratch. Instead of beginning from zero for developing their next gerenartion operating system, they bought a company called NeXT in 1996 whose CEO was Steve Job, the current Apple CEO. This company was founded by Jobs after he left Apple NeXT had a great product called NeXTSTEP, which was a unique and powerful operating system originally only running on the famous proprietary NeXT hardware (NeXT Station and NeXT Cube).

The first versions of the successor of NeXTSTEP was called "Rhapsody" and was running both on Mac and on Intel hardware - the later version wasn't maintained after 5.1. After some years of hard work the final version finally appeared as Mac OS X, one of the best desktop operating systems available today. And even nowadays, the names of many base classes still begin with the prefix "NS" reminding of the original roots of OS X.

For more information about Rhapsody including its history and some screenshots, read on at Shaw's Rhapsody Resource Page. This brings to my mind that I still have a NeXT Station Colour at home waiting for a fresh install plus some Rhapsody media for Intel computers...

Kaya

Finally after my three entries The Future of Computing - The Cell Processor,
Cell Architecture - Continued and The Cell Processor - A new Software Paradigm about the anxiously awaited Cell Processor designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, there are some official details available at Tom's Hardware in the top story called Cell processor to run at more than 4 GHz.

But I guess this will be the last link to new about the Cell Processor in this blog for a while, as the subject gets boring to me. I will concentrate more on making a new demo ready featuring a cloth simulation.

Kaya