Slatehorizon

Wow, didn’t realize it’s been a month now since my last post (until some prodding).  And looking at my last post, there’s a lot that’s changed since then.  I’ll try to make a couple posts over the next several days to try to bring the blog up to speed on the current system status.


Here’s a quick list of the things off the top of my head:

• OpenFiler is dead and gone.  FreeNAS all the way.
• Installed Citrix XenServer to VM Host (put ESXi on USB)
• Purchase of a Netbook (no luck with Hackintosh’ing it)
• Progress studying for RHCE

Spent the day figuring out git and setting up a server on my ESXi server.  I created a new VM and installed Ubuntu 9.10 Server 64 on it.  I own the book Pragmatic Version Control with Git from Pragmatic Programmers on PDF so I worked through that while the server was installing and getting packages installed and whatnot.  For the actual configuration of the server I followed the guide from Andrew Dunn Install (Set Up) Git and Gitosis on Ubuntu.  It was pretty straightforward.  I opted for gitosis in the event I need to add anyone to the setup and since it wasn’t very difficult to begin with.

After about a week of messing around with it, I finally got an OpenFiler system setup as a guest OS inside ESXi and sharing via iSCSI.  Honestly, I don’t even remember what finally fixed the issue, but I was finally able to see the iSCSI share from vCenter and configure it as a datastore.

I went ahead and made a diagram of the network I’d like to put together.


The firewall box has been ordered.  I’ll put that together and get it setup once it arrives.  I’d like to install the FreeSWITCH package as well and see whether I can get a decent soft phone working.  By that time I should have the parts to have an acceptable OpenFiler system setup and a single ESXi machine.  The dream is to be able to farm out jobs to a couple systems as needed and spin up instances of custom images locally.  Say for DVD encoding, DVD ripping, data mining, etc.

Computers are what I love.  This can be somewhat of a problem since that’s a rather broad topic.  I’m hoping to use this blog as a record of the various projects I undertake for posterity and as a measure of progress.


For the moment, I’m just going to list a bunch of projects I’d like to work on.

• Setup VMware system
• OpenFiler NAS/SAN (attached to VMware)
• Setup pfSense firewall
• Personal Cloud/Cluster
• Cable the house – so I can take the noisiest boxes out of my room and theoretically for VOIP
• Setup FreeSwitch phone system (I don’t have the need for a “land line”, I just want to figure it out or possibly build myself a private Google Voice so they’re not controlling EVERY part of my existence)

A little over a year ago I finally bought the parts to build myself a NAS.  My plan was to install FreeNAS and use ZFS.  I had hardware troubles from the get-go and seemingly inconsistent results.  I was never able to get FreeNAS to a point that I liked (I think I had issues doing the install and/or CF card) and eventually had OpenSolaris running on it, thinking I’d get at least half of what I wanted.  But that wasn’t good enough and eventually the project was sidelined and my current drives sat, and my new drives sat until I found a deal on a SATA enclosure and just loaded them in there and hooked up straight to my laptop.


Today’s trouble is with the original hardware for the NAS which I’m repurposing as a virtual machine testbed.  I seem to be plagued with loose connections or something.  A few days ago when I went to install ESXi the system refused to boot from the CD.  Went to the BIOS and there was no CD drive, whereas a week before, as was well, and I hadn’t touched the hardware.  I remember this also happening constantly during my initial NAS setup.


So what got this post started was ESXi not liking the built-in network card, I went out and purchased an add-on card which was coming up in searches and appeared to be compatible, and now it is not.  So I’ll probably be returning this one (which by the was already opened by someone) and head out to Best Buy since I feel like they’d have the better quality cards in stock.