My one year of absence is almost up… Soon I’ll be back with more geek-fu than you could ever imagine! Stay tuned…

Comment on what you’d Like to see most

Hey everyone, as I like to encourage people to read my blog, and thank them for showing me support i’m giving away some Google Wave invites. As I only have 8 of them… add a comment to this post responding to the topic “Why UNIX + Derivatives is better than Windows” and i’ll choose the 8 I like the most and send out Invites =) happy waving!

Introducing VBareMetal!

I’ve been very busy lately, here is one of my latest incarnations, a Virtualisation Linux Distribution, which you can use as a live-cd or a bare-metal installer, it is debian based with virtualbox. Everything configured out of the box. You can run Linux/BSD/Solaris/Windows/Other virtual machines on this distribution, even if your system does not support virtualisation natively! =) Please note, this release is super early, it works, but very bare. In the coming weeks i’ll make it a pretty fully functional system. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey guys this weekend I’ll try to write some cool how-to’s and things, But I’m running out of ideas heh, leave a comment on this post to let me know what you would like to see most, also if you could, could you all place a small link to my blog from your websites/blogs please this code will do it:

<a href=”http://www.captaingeek.net”>Captaingeek</a>

Thanks everyone, and don’t forget to comment =)

Hey everyone, i’ve changed the name of the blog to something a lot more generic… it makes it less personal for me and more geared towards bringing everyone the geekiest fun technolove! all in Web 2.0 :p I hope you enjoy the new place… its still got the same old bits + more! let me know what you think guys

Ever wanted to be able to access the shared libraries from your home… when you are away from home? I do, since I started to use FreeNAS with Firefly iTunes/DAAP media server this is exactly what i want… I’m often away from home, and always wanting to access my media library from within iTunes…

Bonjour (mDNS) is what the iTunes / Firefly DAAP server uses to advertise a “beacon” of your iTunes shared library to your local subnet (LAN), however this is restricted (due to industry pressure (RIAA)) to local area only, and not wide area (the Internet) as it once was… However its still easy to circumvent and work around this issue so you can listen to your shared libraries on the go!

This tutorial is aimed at Mac users, but the concept is possible on every OS using the appropriate tools…

Tools needed:

• an iTunes DAAP server (iTunes 7/8/9 / FreeNAS / Firefly)
• ssh access to that machine (built in on linux / freebsd / mac os x, downloadable for windows)
• a copy of Fugu and Network Beacon (both free)

Once you have all of these it becomes easy, this is the general process of how it works Read the rest of this entry »

Recently i had a thought… Most of my machines are sitting redundant and have upto 4 drives in each… without unscrewing every single one of out of my rack… i want to utilise all of that space into one giant zpool using ZFS.

Imagine combining the drive space resources of 10 computers into 1 giant drive? see where i’m going with this now?

So my idea is to make the drives in each machine available to the “ZFS Master” (the solaris box running the ZFS pool) via iSCSI which is a sort of “offer your drives at a block level over ethernet” protocol… then add them all into a giant zpool… the advantages of this are:

• Utilising all of my hardware
• iSCSI can work over WAN so i could use boxes i have in other cities
• Have each Lun “individual computer + drives” power up via WOL (wake on lan) initiated by the ZFS Master
• Greater level of redundancy possible.
• Backup “ZFS Master” possible
• Everything connected via either Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel.

So imagine.. a rack full of computers with hard drives in them… at the bottom is a more powerful computer running solaris which mounts the hdd’s of every single other computer and adds them into the zpool… then advertises this zpool over AFP / SMB to computers in my house…

Yet another way to make a α size tb system out of old free components that could possibly outperform a £20,000 solution! =) I’ll post all of the results of my testing after the break in a few days

P.S. This idea is without considering performance as that is something i can work out later & thanks bda for your advice

Have you seen the Drobo box? it’s a SAN that allows you to create giant volumes and hot swap out hard drives at will with failure tolerance… bad news, is that it costs close to £1000 even without the drives, i’ll explain how to make a better one… for free! =).

ZFS (Zettabyte Filing System) is Sun’s newest file-system offering, its supported on FreeBSD / Solaris natively and Mac OS X / Linux / Windows via third-party utilities. I’m gonna keep this guide, simple, short and sweet, so i’ll bullet list the main features that wow people about ZFS =)

• It can store up to 340 quadrillion zettabytes of data (no other production filing system can do this)
• It checksum’s your data on the fly so you can check for integrity by “scrubbing” it (identifying broken drives before they completely die)
• It supports every raid configuration you can think of natively and doesn’t suffer from the raid5 data-hole.
• You can create snapshots of your data that do not waste hdd capacity.
• Volumes or “Pools” can be expanded at any time, so you can start with a 2tb raid, and increase it to a 10tb raid with no data loss.
• You can mix/match capacities, brands, rpm’s of drives.
• Its reliable* (on officially supported incarnations anyway)
• Its a memory whore (don’t try it unless you have 2gb ram on your system)
• Its supported in the latest version of FreeNAS (0.7)
• Allows hotplugging of drives when one fails (so you don’t lose data/time)
• Hotspares are supported
• Can be easily transferred / transported to any other ZFS supported system without extensive configuration or any data loss.
• Its free free free free (under CDDL).

Think of a hardware raid5 or a geom_concat/raid and then think about those again, but without any of the issues / flaws they have… thats what ZFS is! =)

So lets get started, I’ll run through creating and bringing a ZFS raid online first, and then some maintenance commands afterwards. I suggest trying this on a Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everyone, yet again I’m apologising for not keeping this blog up to date, rest assured there is good reason behind my absence and you’ll all see some cool tutorials, news and a great new service launching soon, so keep checking back and air your technolove!!!

Hurricane Electric, the most reliable tunnel broker in my opinion have always provided ipv4 exhaustion statistics as found somewhere on this site! however, they’ve now launched an iPhone application and gadgets/widgets for google desktop and windows. From the email they sent me i quote:

“We have just released a free iPhone App, Webpage Widget, and
Google and Windows Desktop Gadgets that report the growth of IPv6 deployment and the exhaustion of IPv4.”

I thought it would be worth  mentioning as i know lots of readers here have iPhones . The iPhone App, Webpage Widget, and Desktop Gadgets are available at:
http://ipv6.he.net/statistics