Just as I was going to copy season 3 of Highlander to aenea, my 1TB NAS system, I ran out of free space on the /usr volume, to which the bulk of the storage had been allocated. Nearly 850GB, gone in a little over a year. Sure, I could clean house a bit and make a little room, but the sad fact is, I need more storage.

I haven’t made a build vs buy decision yet, but I will point out that there seems to be a blind spot in NAS offerings between 1TB and 3TB; plenty go up to 1TB, plenty pick up at around 3TB, but where’s the midrange?

I returned from Rome a week ago last Friday. I’ve been busy with work non-stop since then, so the detailed debrief post will have to wait until later this weekend.

I shot 1000+ photos, plus whatever Rebecca shot, and I even geocoded them all with the sweet geocoding feature in Google Picasa. Why, then, haven’t I posted them? Read on…

I awoke Monday morning to the soothing tone of one of my UPSs on overload. Upon further investigation, the culprit was the APC BackUPS XP 900 that keeps aenea my 1TG SATA RAID NAS box going.

A while back I suffered a power failure in my townhouse that screwed up aenea’s software RAID volume. I swore I’d put her on an UPS so it wouldn’t happen again. And yet, last night, it did.

So, this morning (a Sunday morning during which I was looking forward to beating ejabberd into submission) I awoke to find my file store screwed to the wall. I frantically searched about for the grime-encrusted floppy where I put my custom-compiled HighPoint RocketRaid driver for FreeBSD 6.0-amd64. I finally found it and was about to boot it, only to run across my post from the last time it happened, which refreshed my memory on the coping mechanism and the glorious absence of using an external driver floppy therein.

I have a large collection of technical e-books, about half of which are in Compiled HTML (CHM) format, typically opened by MS HTML Help. I keep them on aenea, my 1TB file server, for easy access anywhere on my network.

Recently I began having trouble opening the CHM files. When I would attempt to open any of the CHM files on the network share, HTML Help would load, but it would display the well-known Internet Explorer “you’re screwed, pal” message:

Because HP DVD drives sucks, prospertine is temporarily without a CD/DVD burner, so I need to use the one in aenea.

I’d never burned a CD outside of Windows before, so I didn’t know where to begin. Turns out FreeBSD includes a tool, burncd, that interfaces with the burner itself. I just need to burn the Fedora Core 4 install CDs, so I already have the CD images, making it pretty straightforward.

There’s more info in the handbook, under Creating and Using Optical Media.

I’m trying this, straight from the handbook:

I’ve set up aenea with Samba, so that users on my network can access her software and music collections from their Windows PCs. I use user authentication, where Samba authenticates connections against the system users. This way, I can access my home directory on aenea, and write to the music and software directories.

What I wanted seemed simple enough: I want to connect as anelson and have access to my home dir and read/write access to the software and music collections, but everyone else on my network should be able to open \\aenea\filestor in Explorer and automatically connect as guests, with read-only access to the software and music folders.

Yesterday while I was at work, there was a brief power fluctuation in my townhouse. Since I’m still setting up aenea, she isn’t yet in my server closet, or hooked up to an UPS. So, predictably, she lost power.

This is somewhat bad, since the Highpoint RocketRaid 2220 SATA RAID controller that powers her 1TB RAID 5 disk array does not deal at all well with unorderly shutdowns, since the RAID logic is implemented in a software driver, not hardware.

Predictably, I suffered some file system damage. I now can’t boot, because /var seems sufficiently damaged to cause a panic in some ffs_whatever module. Thankfully it was /var and not, say, /usr, but nonetheless it sucks badly.

I’m going to use MySQL 5 on aenea, so I thought this would be a good time to try out phpMyAdmin, to see what all the fuss is about.

First, I’ve installed and got working both Apache 2 and PHP 5, both via their respective ports.

I next installed MySQL 5 server and phpMyAdmin via their ports. I enabled MySQL by adding mysql_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf. I started it with /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server.sh start.

To get phpMyAdmin started, I added an alias to the /usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin folder created by the port, so requests for /phpmyadmin would resolve there. To do that was a trivial task for Alias in /usr/local/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

I just installed the apache2 and php5 ports on aenea, and found that accessing .php files via Apache returned the PHP source code, instead of running the PHP server-side.

I had to add the following entries into /usr/local/etc/apache2/httpd.conf in order to get mod_php to pick up the files:

#Register PHP mime types
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

That worked, but index.php wasn’t run automatically if I navigate to a directory. For that I added index.php to the end of the DirectoryIndex directive:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php

Now that I have aenea running ok under FreeBSD 6.0, I want to update the ports collection. Under OpenBSD, this is just a matter of getting the latest ports tree using CVS or CVSup.

The FreeBSD handbook has a useful section on getting the ports tree, which describes using CVSup to get the very latest ports from CVS.

First I install CVSup, which is pretty straightforward. I already have the -Release ports tree, which contains CVSup in net/cvsup-without-gui.