As you guys might have noticed, both myself and my blog updates have been scarce.  Life has gotten busy with other things and other little  projects.  I appreciate all the comments that have followed the articles and I have learned a lot from the community this little project blog has fostered.  Thank you!  I had hoped to incite such a community and am pleased to see that it worked

Comments will continue to be moderated so as to protect from spam (there’s a lot of it I filter out), so please don’t take it personally if your comments take awhile to be approved.

I’ve had my poor man’s apple time capsule running for a little over six months now, and recently Time Machine started spewing errors.

I tried running a Disk Utility “repair” on the affected volume to no avail.  Something about an “invalid sibling link”.

Apparently, it doesn’t like it when you close your Macbook’s lid too many times during an active backup session.  (I do it all the time).

What to do what to do… ah, just fsck it.

Continue reading ‘Fixing a corrupted Time Machine backup’

Reader Kolonel2 to the rescue with a much-requested feature — A script that stops Transmission seeding once it’s seeded to 100%.  Sharing is caring, people!

Continue reading ‘DNS-323 + Transmission — Stop seeding after 100% ratio’

In an earlier post, I described how to use smartctl to see if the hard disks in your NAS were affected by the recent Seagate firmware issues.  In this post I describe the steps I took to upgrade the firmware of both drives in my NAS.  Note:  This article is not specific to DNS-323 users, as it should prove helpful for anyone upgrading their Seagate HD firmware.  (However my tests and checks use linux commands since my drives are sitting in the NAS).
The whole procedure is very straightforward, and only took about 20 minutes.

Continue reading ‘Upgrading the firmware on affected Seagate 1TB hdds’

Hey all… Just wanted to write a quick post asking if anyone else has had issues with firmware 1.06 not loading the ffp modules after a reboot?  I’m not sure if it’s 1.06 or if I broke something while tinkering, but I simply cannot get the 323 to pick up the fun_plug on the reboot.  Anyone else experienced this?  I’ve troubleshooted to absolutely no avail.  I can get in via SMB and the normal admin interface, but cannot telnet or ssh and none of my custom scripts are running.  Basically, the fun_plug is not being picked up after I reboot.  Volume_1 and Volume_2 are still the same and haven’t been swapped.

Figured I would ask before I hose my /ffp directory and start over again :)  Let me know in the comments!

Update:   Dropping the fun_plug back in along fun_plug.tgz seems to have done the trick!  No swapping of drives required.  Kept all my scripts in the same place, everything now works as expected.  Strange.

The recent Seagate hard drive debacle combined with the timely discussions on Time Machine restores got me thinking.

When I architect enterprise systems for my clients, I’m always talking about the same things:  performance, capacity, availability and security.  These concepts sound simple enough up front, but when we get down to it, there’s always more to them than meets the eye.

Take for example availability.  What does it mean to have your data “available” to you?  I’m willing to bet at face value, this means having what you consider important always accessible.  If we’re talking Web 2.0, this might mean that services like gmail, flickr, dropbox, or mobileme are always online when you want to access them.  If we’re talking your DNS-323 NAS, that means that the thing is always up and responding on your network.  It also means the ability to handle - and recover from - failure.  Regardless of the scenario, it should also mean that the data that is important to you must be kept safe, and must be recoverable.  After all, it was a catastrophic hard drive failure on my work laptop was one of the driving reasons for me to buy the 323 in the first place.

Having your data available to you under different scenarios means a lot of different things.  Inherently, architecting for availability means overcoming single points of failure, and evaluating the risks and trade-offs for your particular setup.  It also means carefully considering fault tolerance, data backup and recovery procedures.

Hit the jump for more of my rambling… and what that means to you and your NAS.

Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on your data, backups, failed drives, and architecting for availability’

Hey kids. So in my first post I alluded to the fact that I was going to enable the USB port on the back of the NAS for other stuff. Shame on me for not actually having gotten around to it until now.

We’re going to load a USB driver in the 323’s linux kernel so you can plug things in the back. And do stuff. Fun stuff! like…

• Plug a 2gb usb thumb drive in the back, and run ffp, torrentwatchdog and cron scripts off it, to allow the Volume 1 and Volume 2 disks to stay spun down as much as possible.
• Plug a much bigger external USB drive in the back (like my old Lacie 500gb) and map it as a shared drive.
• Plug an entire USB hub full of crap into the 323!

Continue reading ‘Mounting external disks to the DNS-323 USB port for fun and profit’

Sounds like the big thing everyone is concerned with is the high rate of failure with Seagate’s 1-1.5TB drives.  There’s a firmware update available, and it will probably be a good idea to upgrade the drive firmware if you are affected.  Actually updating the firmware from two drives plugged into my 323 will be a separate problem, but in this post I will describe how to extract all sorts of information from the drives you are running, and proactively monitor them for failures using smartmontools.

You know you want it.  Hit the jump for more.

Continue reading ‘Seagate drive firmware issues, your DNS-323 and smartmontools’

I’m famous!  Well, almost.  My first article on Virtual Federation has been published over at the Sun Developer Network.  Many thanks to Marina Sum for all her hard work and to Pat Patterson for his support and kind words.

This first article focuses on the business value and high-level architecture of OpenSSO’s virtual federation component, while the forthcoming article will be a technical tutorial on how to configure it.

OpenSSO is Sun Microsystems’ web access management, federation and web services security platform, recently named 2009 Security Product of the Year.

Just wanted to report that my upgrade to 1.06 was a success.  Mostly.

I downloaded the 1.06 firmware update from D-Link’s support site, unzipped the file, and then pointed the 323 web interface to it.  It flashed successfully, and everything booted up without issue.

However, I’d been having minor problems with the embedded iTunes server (mt-daapd) not working… at all… So being the bright guy I am, I impulsively clicked the “Restore to factory defaults button”.

Don’t do that.

Continue reading ‘Upgrading the DNS-323 to firmware 1.06 & what to do if you lock yourself out of ssh!’