Soundgarden – The Day I Tried To Live

This is the first Linksys device I’ve ever returned. Stunning disappointment is how I’d explain it.

I got it without researching because, well, Linksys is generally a good brand and I’ve never had problems with their kit in the past. Plus it looks like it will stack handsomely with the new wireless router I have on the way. In my minds eye it would be a bit of geekery that I’d be proud to have on my desk to display to all who enter my office. I also need a way to consolodate data from multiple 200G drives onto a 1TB drive.

What I got was well presented, with thorough documentation and an insanely simple setup. I dropped in a 1TB drive* and jumped right onto the webui (default login/password: admin/admin) as I don’t have a windows box handy for their CD based setup. I manually configured it, and it was straight away sharing on my network. It couldn’t have been easier.

Then I started consolodating my data onto the drive, and here’s where the problems started. It turns out that it formats using the ancient XFS filesystem, and has grossly underpowered hardware, resulting in 3MBps write speeds across the network. This is not pleasant when you’re consolodating some 600G of data. A newer firmware is available that will allow you to format the drive without journalling using EXT2, but this risks a scandisk on every startup and only offers some 6MBps performance.

Options:
1) Return it, get a Macpower Minipod and stack that with the Mac Mini loungebox
2) Stick with it and wait for some performance improving hacks to come out

I opted for option 1.

* It turns out that there are three models of Seagate SATA HDD:
1) Model number ending with AS. Desktop. Rated for 9-5 hours, lowest performance and price.
2) Model number ending with NS. Server. Rated for 24/7, best performance, top price.
3) Model number ending with SV. Video Surveillance. Rated for 24/7, average performance and price.

The SV is the smartest buy for a SOHO NAS, unless you have money to spare for the NS.

Billboards Top 100 – Mike & The Mechanics – All I Need Is A Miracle

I ordered this long before going to Paris so that I’d have something to read on the plane. It didn’t arrive until a week after I got back. How useful. However that’s not the books fault that it took several weeks to arrive, it was a freak disappointing performance from Amazon.

It takes a couple of days to read through if you’re an experienced sysadmin, which is probably not its target demographic. If, like me, you’ve already installed and tinkered and figured out most of Zimbra already, this book will be very light reading useful for ensuring all the basics are covered.

It takes a higher level, broad strokes approach, and reads more like a high school book than a technical book. This is a good thing, as I said before – it makes it light reading, and being seperated up into digestable task-oriented and summarised chapters makes it chunk-by-chunk digestable.

As an administrative reference to have on the shelf for when your server room has melted down though, it’s not so strong a contender. Due to Zimbra upgrading so often this is also well out of date, so another revision is due IMHO.

Overall I felt positively about the book – it serves a purpose, just be sure you recognise that beforehand, otherwise you might be disappointed. I have my Zimbra-fresh colleagues skimming this now so they can have the basic high level topics covered before we move into project mode

Audioslave – Your Time Has Come

Here’s what I wore for my presentation. Red is an action colour… see, when making a pitch it’s all about the subliminal mindgames. (To any colleagues who were at that conference – *jedi handwave* this isn’t the blogpost you’re looking for. Move along.)

The pitch went well, tough questions were asked, most of them I was able to answer. It looks like this project is a-go

Some music box I got on the Champs D’Elysee

As it turns out, the thumbs up handsign that we all know and love is actually offensive to some people so, uhhh, wearing a tee shirt based around a character or mascot that is doing a thumbs up might not be the smartest idea when travelling internationally.

This might explain then why a very angry looking guy at Dubai was glaring at me as if he wanted to tear my head off and shit down my neck, and it would also explain the very angry old lady yelling at me in Montparnasse. Of course I’d just finished over 30 hours of flying and was struggling to find my hotel, so she was ignored, which only made her angrier.

Today we went to the Cemetiere at Du Pere-Lachaise. Cemetary tourism would typically be considered freakish, but as it turned out, there were a few good reasons for this one. Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde (and the various defacing) amongst others.

Yesterday we went to Pigalle in search of musical instruments, and wound up wandering around to the Moulin Rouge (and associated area) and then up to Sacre Cour, which is an amazing place.

Also today we went to La Defence, which features La Dome and the Grand Arche, however it’s 2.30am so I’ll post pictures of those tomorr… today sometime.

Pink Floyd – Take It Back

As promised, here’s the first picture of my cheap n nasty fibre management spool in play:

I need to complete recabling the power, but I think I could get it down to two spools per rack. It might not be a cable management-gasm, but considering the state of cabling that I inherited, this is eons better.

Underworld playing on the Mac Mini loungebox

When I get a kiwiana shirt, that means I’m going overseas. Yes, back to Paris with me, and it’s been a whirlwind of emotion this time around, with me swinging from furiousity (is that a word?) to defeated acceptance.

I was hoping that I would be going via Singapore again, so that I could pick up an Eee PC 1000, but this time we’re going via Dubai… so we’ll have to see if there are any decent deals there that my credit card can handle. Otherwise, my PC for the trip will be my DS Lite