I've been lucky enough to stay away from Windows Vista, having moved to the Mac at home. I've had several chances to play with Windows Vista, but I still prefer the look and feel of Windows XP. A friend who is a Vista user recently had to reinstall from scratch (due to a hardware issue, not a Windows issue), and I needed to use his PC (since reading NTFS filesystems on an old hard disk is something Windows is pretty good at).
The Dell PowerEdge R300 has a Broadcom 5722 network card, which isn't supported by the latest release of FreeBSD (7.0). Patches for the Broadcom 5722 are in the development versions of FreeBSD, but in order to get the development versions, it's easiest if you have net access, which is hard without a working network card.
Seen on BBC Breakfast this morning in an interview about the government's 5-a-day campaign:
Q: "What's in banana chips that makes them healthy?"
A: "Banana"
Warning - this article is a work in progress. So far it's simply an outline. Keep checking back to see if it becomes more than just that!
FreeBSD is a favourite operating system of mine. I've been using it for several years, starting with 5.0. One of the things that was new with 5.0 was GEOM - a disk infrastructure which is more flexible than the previous system.
The number of geom providers has expanded over the years, to about 20 today, providing striping, mirroring, encryption, multipathing and plenty of other things (some without man pages, so I don't know what they do).
The ability to use different geoms together mean that we can combine them to have (for example) encrypted striped mirrors.
Mirroring is commonly used to protect against disk failure, but only on a single machine. Gianpaolo Del Matto has been ambitious and combined a mirror and a gate (which allows you to access devices on another machine) to mirror a filesystem between two systems. However in the event of a device failure or a network problem, the affected device needs to be removed and reinserted into the mirror. During the rebuild process the mirror is useless. It is also only suitable for fast interconnecting networks. If you have a slow network connection between the two servers, and a very large amount of data, a network interruption will require a rebuild that may take a considerable amount of time.
So what about if our two copies are on opposite sides of the world? What if the interconnecting network is slow? What if a large amount of writes are made all in one go?
As far as I can see, there's nothing for FreeBSD that provides the ability to have filesystem replication between geographically separate servers. (rsync scripts and so on don't provide instant updates). There is an option that performs this function for AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Linux and even Windows. Symantec Veritas Volume Replicator (also known as VVR). Unsurprisingly it costs money. Quite a lot of it.
It seems that FreeBSD may have an advantage over other operating systems if it could replicate (at least the core functionality of) VVR. And given that the geom framework exists, along with gmirror, gjournal and ggate, it seems that relatively it wouldn't be too hard to add that. Provided you knew how to code and knew what you were doing. Which I don't.
It's now 6 months since I got my iMac. So what do I think of it?
In terms of configuration management systems for UNIX systems, cfengine is one of the best known, having been around for 15 years. It appears to have a good reputation. Sadly the documentation is pretty dire...
Having a mortgage with Barclays was a result of a discussion with a mortgage advisor when I bought I first house. They worked out the cheapest over three years, so it seemed a logical choice.
The site has been migrated from Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5. At the same time I've chosen to change the layout, as it:
