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Wishlist

Written by Rexxars on November 13th, 2007 [Tags: Other, Christmas]

Til min familie og aller-aller nærmeste venner, jeg har mekket sammen en "wishlist" (ønskeliste) som dere kan få noen tips fra. Den finner dere her.

Det er sikkert ingen dum idé og ta en telefon eller sende en melding til min bedre halvdel (Maj-Lis :-) hvis dere er usikre på noe. Bra det er noen andre enn meg dere kan spørre om hva jeg liker :-) Kontakt meg hvis dere trenger telefonnummeret.

FreeNAS

Written by Rexxars on October 26th, 2007 [Tags: PHP, FreeNAS, Development]

I've been spending a lot of time lately setting up a fileserver, based on the FreeNAS distribution (recommended to me by my friend Christoffer).

The distribution is very compact and lightweight, and yet fairly feature-packed. It's based on FreeBSD, which means I can use the ports for FreeBSD. It's super simple to install, either just run it from the LiveCD or install it to a USB-drive, harddrive or other memory. The installation is just a few steps and then the rest of the settings can be configured in the WebGUI which automatically loads up on boot.

The whole distribution is actually a spinoff based on m0n0wall, a FreeBSD-based firewall. One of the things m0n0wall and FreeNAS does differently than most other distributions is this:

The entire system configuration is stored in one single XML text file to keep things transparent.

Which.. might work on m0n0wall (I haven't really tried it), but I have to say it actually creates a weak point in FreeNAS. The main reason is that the WebGUI is at times a little limited, and sometimes does... stuff it shouldn't do. For example, adding a drive to a JBOD array should be fairly simple, or so I though. But I've found it's just not possible through the WebGUI, which is sad, for a couple of reasons:

• Much of the "simplicity"-feeling is gone when you have to dig around on Google for information on how to do it manually.
• When you DO find out how to do this kind of stuff, and do it all through the shell, these changes are not actually updated on the WebGUI, because it loads all the settings from the XML file.
• Since the changes are not available from the WebGUI, you for example can't create a CIFS/Samba share through the web panel to a mount point that you mounted through the shell.

I set out to try and fix a couple of these things by modifying the commands the WebGUI run, but I was pretty shocked by the code in place at the moment. It's not terrible, but it certainly could be done a lot better. For example, it uses Javascript to show/hide a "Diagnostics" menu, which there is nothing wrong with of course, but that's about the only place it actually use Javascript. Implementing simple Ajax-type features in the system would definitely improve the overall feel.

So my current quest is to partially rewrite the way the WebGUI functions, making it retrieve most of the information from system commands rather than the XML. I might have to look into the way it loads settings, but I haven't gotten that far yet. So far I've decided to replace the WebGUI look with something a little more fresh-looking, like the FreeNAS front page for example.

So if you're thinking about setting up a fileserver/NAS, have a look at FreeNAS. If you're having trouble booting after installing it, you might want to try beta 2. RC1 seemed to have problems installing on my system.