Build your own NAS

Things have really moved on in terms of storage. Not so long ago the largest hard drive you could buy for a home PC was a 200GB IDE. Today, 1TB SATA hard drives are available for less than £100 from my favourite hardware website AUT Direct.

I'll admit that I couldn't resist for long and as I've got a tower PC with 6 IDE hard disks in which are not doing anything at present it was just too much of a lure and I've ordered up 4 1TB disks.
The plan is to replace four of the IDE disks with these 1TB SATA drives and I've bought the necessary SATA drive bays to making swapping them out easier if needed.

As the motherboard is quite old I also purchased two SATA cards which will be able to handle the SATA disks.

The tower also has two IDE disks on an IDE expansion card. This was originally for the OS but I'm going to pull that
and put one of the SATA cards in it's place. The IDE disks are small (either 10 or 20GB) which I'm going to bin and replace with two 250GB IDE disks.

In total the box will have about 4.5TB raw storage capability. I need to configure the 4 SATA drives as RAID 5 in case of a failure. I also want to configure the two 250GB IDE's as RAID1 for the same reason but testing in in VMWare showed it wasn't quite that easy.

The operating system of choice will be OpenFiler. This OS supports all sorts of storage options including CIFS, NFS and iSCSI. It's free and actually supports more than some hardware solutions such as the Buaffalo terrastation I recently bought!

Even so, When finished and configured with the RAID arrays the box should be able to support an impressive 3.2 or so TB or usable storage.

A fun little project......!

Issues upgrading Domain Schema to 2003

So I'm probably a little behind in upgrading my home networks domain schema to support Windows 2003 but better late than never!
The process itself was smooth enough once I'd corrected some problems on the machine but the upgrade logs were not the most helpful troubleshooting aid I've come across.
One particular error had me stumped for a few days:

"Error code: 0x57 Error message: The parameter is incorrect.."

No indication of which parameter it was but as it occurred when checking security descriptors and many blog articles refer to missing security ACL's on GPO's I had a look at those and sure enough, Enterprise admins was missing some rights so I fixed those up and....... the same problem. At this point I'd admit to a lot of head scratching. The event logs didn't shed much light until I realised that the security event logs were not accessible. Sure enough, somehow the ACL's on the security event logs had lost all their rights. Resetting these and then rebooting allowed the process to complete perfectly.

ITIL Overview Training

The company I'm currently working at have decided that ITIL is the way forward. Yes, after several years of different ideas, options, tests and other madness they want to adopt the official ITIL framework over a period of 6-7 months.

Now, whilst I think that ITIL is a good idea and yes, I am something of a convert to the whole ITIL structure I think that the nature of the user/customer base here is simply one that won't tolerate the ITIL way of doing things because it will require them to become more proactive and less reactive. I really do believe that many IT departments are products of the greater company in which they find themselves. Have a company that's reactive and unstructured then your IT department will be as well because it fits in to the business model.

Still, the training was interesting if a little dry and I picked up a few things on Problem Management and Root Cause Analysis. Something I'm very interested in because of the way it deals with problems and provides permanent documented fixes. This is something I'll go into in more detail in a later blog.

As for ITIL here, well.... I really do hope it works but I can see it being a somewhat half-hearted implementation unless the business are prepared to be a little more structured.

The final thing I'll say on ITIL is that it's a nice framework with a focus on how IT should be run but it doesn't address any sort of approach for bringing it into the business. I know that ITIL practitioners will say that this is because each business is different but it would be nice to read some success stories and find out just how they implemented ITIL and what order they implemented it.

Posting update

Yes I know I've not posted for a bit. No excuses and I promise I will try to be good for here on in!

Lot's of changes at work and enough material to fill the blog every day for a year but I do need to actually get on with writing some of it down!

One article a week from here on in. Not a new years resolution but a start of summer resolution.