Havoc! Let me summarise my long list of problems with my custom PC. The spec is roughly:
- ASUS P5KPL-AM Motherboard, with Intel Core2Duo processor
- 3x Western Digital 1TB hard drives, WD10EADS (SATA)
- 1x Western Digital WD160GB, SATAIII HDD,
- DVD burner and USB card reader mounted internally
- 400 W PSU, 2x additional case fans
A little summary of my troubles after the break:
- First I put OpenSolaris on my machine. After failing to get OpenSolaris working the way I wanted in a virtualised environment, I realised part of my problem is … I bought 3x drives to create 2x ZFS pools – a root pool mirrored over 3x drives, and a raidz pool striped over 3x drives. ZFS does “support” this BUT prefers to use whole disks. There IS a way to do it … and based on what I tried in a virtualised environment, it was not straight forward and I could not document the steps correctly. The reason I don’t have a 4th drive is because at the shop – they suggested the power supply may not be able to handle the load.
- To get around the 4th drive restriction … I thought, why not try boot from CompactFlash? Picked up a 4GB CompactFlash card for $70, and found out that OpenSolaris would install to it no problem. On reboot, it failed to boot into OpenSolaris. After much googling, I found some instructions on how to work around this known bug … only to find out that my hardware doesn’t support booting from the USB memory card reader … ???
- Fed up with OpenSolaris and the preference on installing to entire disks, I went with FreeBSD, since it enables write-caching on ZFS installed in partitions/slices. Turns out FreeBSD doesn’t support my network card, the Realtek 8102EL.
- In desparation – it was either buy a CF-card-to-SATA converter and use the CF card as an emulated hard drive, or buy a real hard drive. I discovered that the shop inadvertently supplied me with 2x WD10EADS and a single WD10EACS. The shop admitted their mistake – and promises to replace my slightly under-spec WD10EACS with a real WD10EADS next week. At the same time I bought a smaller 160gig hard drive for my root pool.
- At last – installed OpenSolaris and I’m now configuring Samba to share out my raid-z pool.
Some things to remember!
- Never buy consumer-grade equipment and expect it to function at a pro-sumer, professional or even an enterprise level. If you buy a “budget” PC, then you better be ready for a “budget” experience.
Food for thought
Having said that, I’d be interested in finding out how much a “decent” home-NAS case (ChenbroES34069), with an Intel Atom CPU and decent network cards would cost in Brunei, much like Kristian Toms blogs about.
Imagine selling those at a premium, and providing some backup over the cloud. Oh well. I’m now trying to get CIFS/Samba working correctly on this thing … contemplating wiping clean and using SOLARIS 10 instead of this OpenSolaris …
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