Drives and cages are in. I am sorry for the bad picture my camera broke and I had to use a flashlight and cell phone. I still have the parts in burnin, which I started out with a very very long ext3 format with block checking. Since there will be no need for a CD/DVD I have the drive sitting on top until I install a distro.

Originally I was going to use FreeNAS, and I have looked into NASLite and Openfiler, but decided to make my own distro. I may actually make it public in the end, but I just didn’t feel that I would use FreeNAS forever and therefore did not want to use UFS as the file system. I am also considering using it as a desktop since I have so much power to spare, but that would only be for a little while.

P.S. I know how ghetto a flashlight and cell phone is

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Slicehost, but it is a VPS solution that is affordable and very stable. Slicehost does not oversell system resources, so when you purchase a “slice” you aren’t getting some bogged down server loaded with virtual environments. I have been using them for many months now and I encourage people to sign up. I have 2, 512mb RAM Slices that have 20gb hard drives and each get 200gb of bandwidth each costing $38/mo. I run Pingdom on each one and there have only been a few occasions that I have been emailed about downtime and most of those were self inflicted. This website was taken down and just moved over, but since it has been on Slicehost the slice has been up 100%. One of my client’s has a Slice as well and his has not dipped below 99.9% for the past 3 months and the only times it went below that were for events unrelated to the virtual environment. All Slices are prorated so if you only use one for an hour the money would be refunded, or if you start a new one mid month you are only charged for the percentage of the month you used.

For those of you wondering what distros you can choose from:

• Arch 2007.08
• CentOS 5.1
• Debian 4.0 (etch)
• Fedora 8
• Gentoo 2007.0
• Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (dapper)
• Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)
• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (hardy)

If you decide to try them out, I would appreciate it if you used my referral link below.

I received the drive cage and loved it so I ordered some more parts for my file server. In all this is what I have (drives were just ordered).

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+, Socket AM2
• G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
• ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 Motherboard
• MSI GeForce 7300LE 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCIe Video Card
• SYBA SD-CF-IDE-BR IDE to Compact Flash Adapter (Bracket Version)
• 3x SUPERMICRO CSE-M35T-1B Black 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure
• 9x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB Hard Drives

I went ahead and bought a 9th hard drive so that the model and firmware would be the same if a drive happened to die. I am going to be doing a burnin on all the hardware when the drives arrive to make sure anything that is bad will fail so I can RMA it. I changed from Areca to Adaptec for my RAID card and they just sold out of the Adaptec. Hopefully the price will not go back to $500. After being formatted and put in a RAID6 array I will have 4.09TB of storage space.

It looks like our electronic devices can be searched by customs when entering the US. This somewhat violates the 4th amendment, however there is a border exception to the 4th amendment and unless I am wrong you are not officially in the US until you pass customs/border so the amendment would not apply.

A lot of company policies state that you should not be holding confidential information on laptops in the first place, but email, and browser cache can contain that information. To help prevent the information from intranets from being cached you can install JohnnyCache. JohnnyCache lets you enter in a url pattern and will prevent disk and memory based cache from being accessible when viewing a site matching that pattern. I highly recommend you install this extension regardless of your traveling habits.

I am going to be writing additional posts about handling these searches. These posts are going to be directed at protecting corporate information and personal information.

If you have ever done any contract work or had to actually work with customer requests you will probably get a good laugh out of Clientcopia. I recommend the top 20 list.

It’s one thing when a client is just not knowledgeable about what you are doing for them, I mean that is why they are paying you, but when people get pissy they need to be let go quickly.

Example:

Me: “What’s your email, sir?” Tom Smith: “Tom Smith… t-o-m-s-m-i-t-” Me: “Tom Smith, got it..” TS: “And it’s all together, ok? No spaces. And don’t use any capitals, do you hear me? All in lower case!” Me: “Yes, tomsmith in all lower case. Got it. And your email provider, sir?” TS: “Huh?” Me: “The part after the @ sign.” TS: “What sign?” Me: “Sorry, I mean what does it say after your name?” TS: “Well, it’s this… a inside a bubble…” Me: “Yes, that’s right, the @ sign, and after that?” TS: “It says hotmail… not m-a-l-e, not like a hot man.. h-o-t-m-a-i-l.” Me: “Got it, mail as in e-mail.” TS: “Not e-mail, hotmail! You’re not using capitals on that, are you?”