planetofidiots.com

4TB Xserve vs. Whitebox Apple File Sharing

admin — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:29:28 +0000

I show $12,100 for a bare-bones 4TB Xserve raid system at the Apple store. At AVADirect (random integrator), I spec’d out an equivalent system, same processor, memory, and RAID capacity, but in a humble tower case:

$2600.00

You’ll run CentOS (no charge or upgrade fees), with netatalk (no charge or upgrade fees), and you’ll have your mountable HFS volumes. Am I missing something here? I doubt whatever additional “stuff” you get with Apple is worth that $9500 spread. Unless of course, you’re actually concerned about fashion design for a back-room device.

Since you’re probably some small business owner/sole-proprietor in the entertainment business (not a tech guru or you wouldn’t be considering Apple servers in the first place), it’s unlikely you’re going to skip AppleCare support (add $1000), or X-Serve support ($6000 annually). Somewhere between that $1000 and $6000 you can probably manage to find a competent administrator to set up your whitebox system (maybe even do it yourself and save a bundle). Just don’t forget the APC Battery backup and apcupsd.

KDE 4.3.4 – This is gettin good.

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 05:09:08 +0000

I’ve been at this since Suse 7 (ppc) with kde2.0, circa 2000:

http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/kde2b3_5.png

KDE is now, finally, kicking butt. At first I’m like “Nepomuk, Strigi, Akonadi…yeahright”. Now, not so much. The Personal Information Management (PIM) stuff is working extremely well. There are several KDE desktop/laptops here running Kontact, all using akonadi to centrally store (remote MySQL db) calendar events, to-dos, journal entries, addressbook data… _damn, does that solve a huge data sync problem. Enter an appointment or to-do on the laptop, it shows up on the desktops (after a refresh). It works.

Lot of complaints out there about Strigi file indexing consuming processor cycles, and OS X users complaining about Spotlight. To mitigate indexing load, reduce the scope of the indexes (System Settings > Advanced > Desktop Search > Advanced Settings) and/or renice your nepomukstorage processes to 19 (htop is handy for this sort of thing). Or, it may not even be a good time to bother with Strigi, since it’s got a lot of work to go yet. What’s cool is semantic technology, and laying groundwork to leverage it.

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi

http://pim.kde.org/akonadi/

http://www.omat.nl/tag/akonadi/ (developer blog)

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Nepomuk

http://strigi.sourceforge.net/

http://nepomuk.kde.org/discover/user

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Decibel

http://mac.kde.org/

http://wiki.kolab.org/index.php/Kontact_for_Windows_%28beta-huge-debug%29

fed_fishey

Flesh-Eating Algorithms

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:06:06 +0000

Right then. Just testing out the ole headline…uhm…thing. You’re reading here now, so apparently it works. Excellent. I’m going to report the results of this test to the proper department, and then we’ll be off!