For a long time I have been planning to build a massive NAS to store all my projects and photographs and my Linux distro collection. When I bought a lot of network equipment a while back a 5U case was included that I decided to use instead of ordering something. The case has 12 standard 5.25 bays and 1 slim 5.25 bay. It fix extended ATX motherboard and is quite long, so it gives me plenty of space. To make efficient use of the space I am putting in hotswap drive bays that will fit 5 hard drives in 3 bays, giving me a total capacity of 15 drives. I have also found a RAID card that supports RAID6, online expansion and all the goodies, and runs about $435. This is more than I wanted to spend, but RAID6 and an oncard processor is worth it. The machine will run FreeNAS and will allow me to have only 1 hard drive in all of my other machines. As of right now I have ordered and installed the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+, Socket AM2
• G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800
• ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 Motherboard
• MSI GeForce 7300LE 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCIe Video Card

I just ordered a IDE->CF card adapter and one of the drive bays to make sure it is what I want. If I like the drive bay, the remaining parts I need are the RAID card, and 8 Western Digital 750GB hard drives. In RAID6, I will have 4.09TB of total space, if I went with RAID5 I would have 4.77TB. While RAID5 is good, I would feel better if I knew I could lose 2 drives and still have all my data safe. I mean this is going to be backups of my systems, and all the files that are most important to me. I may need to upgrade the power supply along the line, but for the time being I should be fine as it has a 420w PSU. I will post pictures when I get my new camera.

This article lists some very good ideas for improving your life. To sum it up, here is the list.

1. Start a business
2. Organize a group
3. Volunteer
4. Take an active role in your children’s’ activities
5. Start a family
6. Write a book
7. Learn an art
8. Run for office
9. Take up a sport
10. Set an outrageous goal — and achieve it!

I have done a few of these… Learn an art, Take up a sport, Start a business, but what I really want to do is write a book and start a family.

First is that the site is back online. About 2 months ago I stopped updating the blog and during that the version of Wordpress I was running had a exploit and the pages (not posts) were deleted and I decided I should just take it down until another major version came out. There are a couple things that are out of place and pages will slowly start coming back after I update the contents of them so they are accurate.

I passed my Offensive Security Certified Professional test, so now I have that certification and in a few weeks I will be preparing for LPIC and Linux+ exams. I would also like to start working towards my CCNA. I know nothing about routing and I need to work on my subnetting so it will be good for me.

I will try to post some pictures of the apartment, my digital camera took a crap so it will have to wait until I get a new one. I recently bought an LG42LB5D 42″ 1080p LCD TV and a Playstation 3… boy does 1080p look good.