I'm Happy About Some Things After All
Been tooling around with Canon’s 100mm f/2.8 macro lens lately. Nothing really spectacular yet, though I do like these two pictures that I grabbed at the Chicago Botanic Garden:
Aechmea (overhead view)
Orchid (stigma closeup)
I’ve been flipping through Christopher Beane’s flower portraits, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s an influence. Obviously what I’m doing is far worse than Beane’s work, but oh well.
—
I built an OpenSolaris and ZFS -based file server a few weeks ago, and it’s worked out amazingly well. 4 TB of storage with the ability to survive the loss of any two drives. It came out to just a tad under $1000, which is pretty good, I think. Here is the parts list. (The parts list goes over $1000, but that’s because I threw in a gigabit Ethernet switch, which isn’t really part of the server.)
The file server has so far been storing all my photos, music, and videos, and does some double duty as a VM and disk image host. It’s running PS3 Media Server; from there, I can stream all that stuff to a PS3 (obviously) or my phone. Is pretty nice.
—
Finally, another word on servers: I’ve been rebuilding my personal servers using Chef, and it’s great.
The server known as extremely.overused.name runs, among other things, my private Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Source dedicated servers. Running these servers requires a bunch of supporting infrastructure:
- 32-bit compatibility libraries (since the server code is a bunch of 32-bit proprietary binaries and I run 64-bit OSes)
- firewall setup
- screen, just because it’s useful
- a web server for efficiently serving game assets
and some other stuff.
Well, instead of having to remember to install all that, I can just encode installation and configuration rules as Ruby programs. Provisioning and convergence can then be done automatically. Woo.
Another project in the same vein as Chef is Puppet, which is being used by the Free Software Foundation.
I’ll get around to posting my Chef recipes sometime, if anyone’s interested.