A Blog

The server in the basement is currently a dual Opteron system in a one rack unit case. To say that it’s loud is an understatement. I guess it needs a lot of air flow to keep those processors cool. Since I hardly need the machine for its horsepower and just use it for storage, I decided it should get replaced with a quiet, low-power Intel Atom based computer. I found just the system from Foxconn, a small case with space for two disks. From Newegg, it cost $130 plus $20 for 2GB of memory.

I threw some disks into it, and chose to install FreeBSD 7.2. Currently, FreeBSD can not boot off of ZFS yet. To get around that, I netbooted the installer and dropped the system onto a thumb drive. I figure that flash memory won’t generally go bad, and that leaves the ZFS mirror for data.

Getting the FreeBSD installer to netboot was a little tricky. One can download the “bootonly” CD and extract it into a directory to be served off of NFS. With some DHCP magic to give the PXE bootloader on the NIC the server’s address and the file to boot from, it seemed to just go.. There was one sticking point: you’ve got to tell the boot loader to instruct the kernel where to find its root file system. It tuns out you can just add a line to the loader.conf file to fix it all up:

vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0c"

Once the system got installed to the thumb drive, it was fairly easy to boot into single user mode and run the zpool and zfs commands to whip up a mirror volume. I copied /usr and /var into ZFS, resetting the mount points using ‘zfs’, and rebooted into a nicely functioning FreeBSD-ZFS nas.

So far, I’ve been trying to do a lot of weird I/O to see if I could get the system to crash. Thankfully, the following tuning parameters in the system’s loader.conf seem to be working really well:


zfs_load="YES"
vfs.root.mountfrom="zfs:puddle/root"
vm.kmem_size_max="1024M"
vm.kmem_size="1024M"
vfs.zfs.arc_max="512M"
vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=1


It may not hold more than 2TB currently, but it seems to be performing wonderfully. Plus, it’s now a lot quieter in the basement!

Back in high school, I was pretty active in a program called FIRST Robotics, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. This year, my first FIRST team celebrated its ten year anniversary. 461 is the team at West Lafayette Junior/Senior High School. My first year on 461 was the last year there would be only a single team in the Purdue area serving all the area’s students. Flo and gang has helped start many teams all over the nation, but my second year (2005) would see the founding of 1646 and my third year (2006) would be when I founded 1747 at my high school. Being back in the shop at Westside was pretty amazing. Not much has changed since I was last there, asking to borrow tools for our makeshift shop in the science wing on the second floor of Harrison.

In other news, 1747 won the Buckeye Regional competition and the Buckeye Regional Engineering Inspiration Award; earning a place at the Championship Event this year. Quite amazing.