Last October when Hostmonster moved my site from one of thier smaller servers to the new hardware, they somehow screwed up my photo site.  I finally got some time and moved the site as is to a new location and re-built it.  The software package I use is called Gallery.  I’m using version 2.3 which is quite stable and very nice.

Once I got everything back up, I re-imported my parents 488 photos.  The import process was able to read the pictures from the old site but I had to copy by hand all of the picture titles.  As you can guess, it took me hours to get them all.  I had the kids help and do a spot check to see if I missed anything.

I also need to get the 10,000+ photos on my Mac organized.  I’ve decided that the website, my Mac, and my new external NAS are all going to be one project.  Right now they are all located inside iPhoto 08.  I don’t like that they are all stored in one big bundle.  I also can’t nest them.  Nor can I adjust specific colors (I.E. red for dive photos).  This is a big limitation in my eyes.  To solve this I bought Aperture.

I’ve been running this site on WordPress.  I finally took some time and upgraded from 2.5.1 to 2.7.  It took me a bit to get everything working again.  I broke one of the main widgets, one of the themes needed to be upgraded, and I found a couple sites lost the bot blocker software I installed.  That said, I think it’s done and everything is working again.

Well, I ran into a small issue with the DNS-323.  The version of Samba that’s included with their 1.06 firmware is 3.0.24.  My guess is I hit a bug.  I.E. when I try to create a share that’s “read only” and also use a “write list”, I am only granted read only.  It’s also a bit supprising that D-Link has not kept up with the Samba versions/patches.  I.E. the latest version is 3.2.8 (24 versions back).  For right now it’s not worth the time building my own version but if it becomes a pain, I’m glad that I have that option.

On other thing to note, once you walk off the D-Link path and start changing the smb.conf file by hand, do not use the web interface to make changes, I.E. ADVANCED -> NETWORK INTERFACES.  This will cause the web server to crash and that will cause it to reboot.  The script that does the reboot also reboots the Samba services.

Time Machine was designed to work with locally attached storage or storage attached to either Apple’s AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule products.  That said, it’s not that hard to make it work with any old NAS solution.  Here are the steps from a terminal window:

1. Enable support for unsupported disks via: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
2. Create a SPARSEBUNDLE.  To do this, you need to create it on your local volume.  The command is: hdiutil create -size XXg (XX = size in GB) -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname “Name of your Backup” -fs “Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+” -verbose ./Computername_MACaddress
3. To find out the MACADDRESS just use: ifconfig en0
4. Copy the bundle and all of it’s subdirectories to the root of the NAS share.

Once you point Time Machine to the share, it will find the SPARSEBUNDLE and use it for backups.

As one site pointed out, the Samba server can be optimized a bit for Macs by just adding: “large readwrite = no” to the global section of the smb.conf file.  Now at first take that looks easy but…. it gets overwritten each time the device is booted.

A simple modification of the fun_plug can make everything better:

Find the line “cd /” and add the following:

if [ -e /mnt/HD_a2/smb.conf ]; then

  	cp /mnt/HD_a2/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf

  	smb restart

else

  	cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /mnt/HD_a2/smb.conf

fi

It did not take me long, ok less than a day to get under the hood of the new NAS enclosure.  D-Link was nice enough to run Linux on the box.  As part of the boot process, the NAS executes can execute a script called /Volume_1/fun_plug.

A german developer has done all of the heavy lifting.  He packaged up a shell script and additional software to make everyone’s life a bit easier.  This includes allowing ssh access to the device and some handy applications including rsync.

A decient tutorial on how to install fonz’s fun_plug and setup access via ssh is: http://nas-tweaks.net/CH3SNAS:Tutorials/fun_plug

The little “toaster” arrived yesterday.  As you can guess, when I got home I had to open it up and install it.  My first impressions are, wow – this is cool.  It took me less than an hour to get it installed and usable.

The first thing I did was goto Seagate’s site to see if the two new 1.5TB drives I purchased were affected by the manufacturing/firmware problems.  Luckly, no issues   Next I installed the drives and plugged everything in.  The box came to life and grabbed a DHCP address from the router.  I opened up a web browser and was able to login.  The unit arrived with firmware version 1.04.  D-Link released 1.06 in December and it added support for the new 1.5TB drives.  I downloaded the firmware and appied it.  Once the box rebooted, I was able to use the new drives.  It took about 40 minutes for format the 1.5TB drives using RAID-1.

Our old and trusty pressure cooker finally bit the dust late last year.  Every time I get a roast and think about using the pressure cooker, I have to remind myself that it’s gone.  We had one of the traditional ones with the jiggler weight.  We got it as a present from my parents a long long time ago.

Roll the clock forward and after some digging around, I decided to go with the Fagor Duo 8-Quart Pressure Cooker.  I also bought a couple new cookbooks, “Pressure Perfect: Two Hour Taste in Twenty Minutes Using Your Pressure Cooker” and “Chili Madness: Second Edition”.  If you know me, you know that I love Chili all year round.  I kept seeing a Chili book at Williams Sonoma and have almost bought it a couple times.  Who knows, I still might buy that one as well

I’ve been looking for some sort of better storage strategy for my home network for some time. To date, anything important I’ve stored on my Macbook Pro.  About once a week I do a Time Machine backup to an external USB drive.  I also do an additional backup of my critical information to an online provider called Mozy.

Right now, I’m running out of hard drive space on the Macbook which has a 160GB drive.  To make matters worse, I bought my wife a new digital camera for Christmas.  It’s a 10MP which as you can guess can chew up a lot of space quickly.

I’ve looked at Buffalo, D-Link, HP, Iomega, Linksys, Maxtor, Netgear, QNAP, and Synology.  My initial goal is simple.  I want at least 1TB of RAID protected network storage for under $500.  I really want to use the new Seagate 1.5TB drives which are $130 even though they have had a bumpy start.  I think that Seagate has identified the problem drives and firmware.  If I could have a bit more, how about being able to mod the box and run some other software?  I want to run a RSYNC solution where I can backup the NAS to my web hosting provider.  That said, I want the backups to be encrypted and automated (scheduled).

From first glance, the Maxtor got terrible reviews as did their “green” drives.  I did not like being locked into the drives being shipped with some enclosures.  That dropped off the Buffalo and HP boxes.  This also put a limit to how much the enclosure should cost, I.E. 500 – (2 * 130) = $240  I liked both the QNAP and Synology boxes but they priced themselves out when you factor in the cost of the drives.

I was actually not interested in the D-Link product line based on my experience with some of their older networking gear.  As I dug around the Internet, the DNS-323 seemed to really perform and has a good following.  I’ve found a thriving community of modders.  I’d love to have more than two bays but I can’t do that and stay under $500.  I know, I could have rolled my own and ran FreeNAS but there is a lot to be said for a small toaster appliance that spins down and goes to sleep drawing almost nothing when it’s not in use.

Well, I’ve taken the plunge and bought the D-Link DNS-323 for $188 and it also has a $30 mail-in rebate.  All said and done, I’ll have 1.5TB of space that’s RAID-1 protected for $418 with the rebate.

I’ll write more once I get it and have some time to really play with it.